Lampward
cd ..

Savoir-Faire

Emily Short · 2002

You came back to the house you grew up in to ask for money. Nobody is home, and everything in it is connected to everything else.

Play

SAVE creates a named Lampward checkpoint on this device. Nothing is saved automatically.

  • Z-code
  • Fantasy
  • Parser
  • About 5 hours
  • 303 KB

About

Savoir-Faire is set in a French country house whose objects can be linked: the Lavori d'Aracne lets you tie one thing to a similar thing, so that opening one opens the other, and a lit candle warms a cold one across the room. Almost every puzzle in the house is built out of that single verb.

It is one of the most admired puzzle designs in the form precisely because the magic is a consistent system rather than a set of special cases — you solve problems by understanding how linking works, not by finding the one object the author hid. The house also happens to be the one the protagonist grew up in, and the game is quietly about that too.

Tags

  • Classic
  • Fantasy
  • Large
  • Puzzles

History

This chronology includes the world around Savoir-Faire: background that may predate the game, its creation and publication, and later editions, research, and preservation. An early date is historical context, not necessarily a game release.

  1. Publication

    Savoir-Faire published — by Emily Short

    The publication year for the work itself. Earlier entries are historical background, not earlier releases of the game.

  2. Lampward

    Playable release — Release 8

    The exact release Lampward currently serves. It may be a later edition or port of an older work.

Documents & sources

  • archived listing · Reference

    Savoir-Faire in the Electronic Literature Collection

    The Electronic Literature Organization's edition of the work, and the page whose licence statement Lampward's hosting rests on. It names the exact file and places it under CC BY-NC-ND 2.5.

    Electronic Literature Organization

  • reference · Reference

    Savoir-Faire on IFDB

    Reviews and release history, including the Release 8 revision Lampward serves.

    IFDB

  • reference · Reference

    Savoir-Faire on IFWiki

    Background on the game and on the Lavori d'Aracne linking system its puzzles are built from.

    IFWiki

Rights to these documents are separate from rights to the game. Lampward links to archives it may not mirror, and says so rather than implying it holds a copy.

Credits & License

Credits
Emily Short. Distributed in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 (Electronic Literature Organization, 2006).
Playing
Savoir-Faire — Release 8, Z-code 8, serial 040205
IFID ZCODE-8-040205-6630
License
CC BY-NC-ND 2.5
Use
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.5: Lampward may host and serve the unmodified story file with attribution, for noncommercial use only.
Source
Notices

Copyright © 2002 Emily Short.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. You may copy and redistribute the unmodified story file, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/

Artwork
No cover art is used; the title card is generated by Lampward.

Rights to the game binary, to cover art, and to any documentary material on this page are separate. A permission covering one does not cover the others.

More bibliographic detail: this title on IFDB