You play as Pierre, a young man in 18th century France who is the adopted son of a wealthy Count. In need of money, you return home, but the Count himself is nowhere to be found. Fortunately, you are gifted with the aristocracy's magic heritage, the lavori d'Aracne, which enables the gifted to mystically link two objects as long as there is some similarity or connection between them. With the help of this power, you set about uncovering the mansion's secrets.
You can download or play it online here.
Short made two other games set in the same universe. Damnatio Memoriae (2006) is a distant prequel, set in the early Roman Empire and adding some new facets to the lavori (or the Art of Venus Genetrix, as it is called in that era). First Draft of the Revolution (2012; co-written with Liza Daly) returns to the time-frame of Savoir-Faire, and exchanges the parser-based adventure game for a set of interactive letters written by important players on the eve of The French Revolution.
Contains examples of:
- Chandelier Swing: When you're in the kitchen, you can stand on the table and swing from the chandelier to get down.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Central to the game, since having the same colour is one of the possible connections that allow items to be linked. Some puzzles involve recolouring an item so that it can be used to affect another. Or, in the case of the basement doors, making their colour appear different by other means.
- Damsel in Distress: Played straight with Marie, whom you have to save (from a distance) in the endgame. Though she wastes no time saving herself once you've provided her with an escape route.
- Developer's Foresight: Everything that is similar enough can be linked using the lavori, regardless of whether that linkage is necessary to solve a puzzle. Even the books and recipes you find can be reverse-linked, resulting in some funny descriptions of their new contents.
- Easter Egg: After beating the game, you can get a list of amusing things to do. One of the most notable is the addition of a classic cheat code, typing "XYZZY" into the parser, which grants you a secret recipe for Easter eggs you can cook and eat.
- Food Coma: After Pierre finally eats his big meal, he needs to go sleep it off by finding a bed.
- Food Porn: The game is full of this. The protagonist starts hallucinating about various delicious foods when hungry, and one major puzzle is finding all the ingredients for a meal. (You can even go for a vegetarian version if you prefer to.)
- The Key Is Behind the Lock: The game has one locked door where you can see the key through the keyhole. The solution to unlocking this door is more creative than the usual ones, due to the game world's Functional Magic which lets you "link" similar things to each other so that doing something to one of them will similarly affect the other: link the key to your Sword Cane (it's ornate enough to allow the link) and then turn the sword in the cane. Voila, an unlocked door!
- Last Lousy Point: Parodied. There's a specific action you can do, obscure and not really connected to the game's main story, that gets listed in your final score as "1 as the Last Lousy Point". You have to give a monologue from atop the kitchen table.
- Magic Mirror: Linking two mirrors together will allow you to look into one to see through the other. This is used for a puzzle somewhat early on, but then comes back for the final segment of the game.
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Nintendo Hard: As a result of difficult puzzles, the ability to accidentally lose or destroy important items, and a fairly lengthy game. - Scoring Points: You earn points for collecting certain items, stepping foot in certain rooms, or completing story objectives. Some objectives are optional, meaning you can complete the game without getting all 125 points, which changes some text in the ending.
- Synchronization: The game has a magic system based around linking objects so that what happens to one happens to the other as well. People can also be linked, and it's said that members of feuding aristocratic families are often linked to one another as a sort of hostage thing, so that one family can't harm members of the other without also hurting their own relatives.
- Unwinnable by Design: The game gives you several opportunities to screw yourself out of victory. One occurs when you have to retrieve a bauble from a high shelf; you not only have to make sure it doesn't shatter, you also need to throw one of your inventory items up there for it to fall down - and the inventory item you use for that purpose can't be retrieved, so you'd better hope that said item isn't one you'll need later on.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: Played with. The PC gets hungry, though he can't die from it (going hungry for a long while causes him to start hallucinating, though), but he is required to prepare a meal (a rather ludicrously elaborate one, at that) in order to progress in the game.
