Geoffroi Le Brun, young Musketeer wannabe, arrives at the city of Rouen late at night only to find a dying man on the steps of the local tavern. It's the Comte de Peuple - stabbed and robbed by four assassins. Geoffroi promises to fulfill the dying man's last wish: to recover his stolen will and deliver it to Paris.

Finding the culprits isn't too hard - they're sitting behind the very door in front of which the Comte has just drawn his final breath. Being outnumbered, the hero can't stop them from escaping, though, and that's where things start to get complicated...

Touch belongs to the final generation of classic point & click Adventure games. Considering this, controls are pretty good: the cursor reacts to things which can be interacted with by showing their names, and the right mouse button opens a context menu with fitting verbs. Simple, but but overly simplified, fortunately.

Graphics are quite typical for the time, too. The screen resolution of 640x400 pixels (four times the standard VGA resolution) isn't used very efficiently. Background have been drawn nicely, but especially the characters don't look better than for example Guybrush always did. Nothing to complain about, of course. Just the animations: wooden.

Taking Monkey Island and Guybrush as examples for comparison wasn't a random choice. Touch tries very much to achieve the same feeling and quality of the genre's big idol, but without turning into a pure imitation (like for example Simon the Sorcerer). High standards to be compared to.

No game could ever stand up in such a competition, of course, and that's also valid for Touch. As funny as it may be at times, as nicely thought out as the puzzles may be and as lovingly some of the characters may have been written - the final touch of genious is missing. Especially in the dialogues which sometimes turn ackward and sport logical jumps.

Seen on its own right, Touch sticks out from most of the competition, though. Especially considering its young age and what was typically produced at the same time, that's rather surprising. A sympathetic little gem.

Technical note: Put the game into the directory C:TOUCHE . Otherwise, it won't run.


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