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Faust

Faust is like a lot of French movies I've seen. It thinks it's profound, it's actually kind of silly, it doesn't always make sense, but love it or hate it, you have to admit that at least it's trying.

Only the French would base on adventure game on Goethe's Faust. Here Faust is an elderly black man, (with the voice of a young, probably white guy), who has been asked by a Eurotrash Mephistopheles to judge the souls of seven members of a carnival called Dreamland -- Siamese twins, a midget, a lion tamer, that sort of thing. The fates of these characters are tied together; the twins love the lion tamer, the midget wants him dead, stuff like that. They all want something and Mephistopheles offers it to them for a price. Your goal is to find out what they want, what they got, and what they paid for it.

To find this out, you have to solve a lot of puzzles. Some of these puzzles are hard and others are really, really, really hard. I had to cheat a few times, but I don't think there were any puzzles that were completely unfair, so if you're smarter than me, as many people are, you could expect to make it through this one without cheating. (Except, perhaps, for the first hard puzzle, which involves a combination lock that works differently from the one's I used on my school locker.) While you're solving you can listen to music by the likes of John Lee Hooker and Sarah Vaughn, one or two songs per soul. Some of the songs are great (I don't know who Presence is, but they're really cool) but if you're stuck for long enough they start to really grate on your nerves.

Mephistopheles is meant to be a complex character, which means that, like in a French movie, he tells you he's complex and throws out some rather trite truisms that will seem very deep to you if you're twelve and have never heard them before or you're a film critic for a major magazine and just don't know any better. The story is meant to become increasingly complex and profound, but by the end it seems more like a rather mediocre episode of The Twilight Zone.

Which is not to say that it doesn't have effective moments, most notably the sad history of the Fat Lady. It's also a nice looking game with some fun animations, most notably with the Siamese twins (you're gonna love their toilet). Faust is ambitious (although one wishes they'd worked a little harder on getting the sound to work right -- it would sometimes get all burbly, and I had to leave subtitles on for this reason), and it's nice to see a game that wants to make you think about the great issues. "A" for effort, France.

-- Charles Herold -1999