The last time I played Incantation, released in 1987 by Softhawk, on Amstrad CPC, was a few months ago, with the idea of talking about it on this blog.
The penultimate time I played Incantation was on April 21, 2000, at around 4pm, when one of my best friends at the time called to tell me that his mother, whom I knew almost as well as he did, had had a stroke – followed rapidly by her death – and was acting as a kind of surrogate mother to me in Nancy, where I was studying. This event and the game have always been associated for me.
Death is the most banal thing in the world, and yet it is incomprehensible. It is incomprehensible as a "thing" and its occurrence, the reasons for its occurrence, are also sometimes incomprehensible, or let's say, so unexpected, so astounding, so intolerable, in some cases, that we touch on the incomprehensible.
I don't know if I'll ever really play Incantation again; it looks like a good game, or at least one rich in verbs and objects – since it's a text-based game, where you choose, from lists, a verb and then the object to which you want to apply it - or the subject you want to discuss with an NPC. The settings are simple but beautiful, evocative and fundamentally romantic – the Breton moors, an isolated family home, the night... But when I played it again, almost twenty years after my first time, I realized (because I didn't know anything about the scenario) that NPCs started dying over time, without me knowing why, or whose fault it was, or what I was supposed to do - or if I could do anything about it. I preferred not to insist.
