The Stack

Touché! is pretty big on asset reuse. The exact same character sprite will be used as a street vendor in one city and a random NPC milling about in the background to make the city look inhabited in another. It’s like a small theater company where actors have to double up on roles.

But the biggest bit of reuse comes with the town blacksmiths. It’s a lot like Officer Jenny and Nurse Joy in the Pokémon cartoons: each town has its own blacksmith, and they’re all identical, and the game lampshades this. Moreover, their smithies are also nearly identical. There are some minor differences — one will have its layout mirror-reversed from another, or a paint can on a shelf will be blue instead of red. And these differences can be a sign of what’s important. If there’s a pair of tongs lying on the floor in one smithy and not the others? Those tongs are needed for a puzzle in that town. And I, for one, didn’t notice they were clickable until I noticed that they weren’t in the other versions of the room. I’d be tempted to take screenshots and do some magic in an image editor to find all the differences, except this wouldn’t really be adequate. Some of the differences between the rooms isn’t in what’s visible, but in what’s clickable, or the contents of their verb menus.

There’s a similar thing going on with a couple of identical clothiers, but I’ve only seen two of those.