Ray reaches back into the El Obscuro file again to find an unjustly ignored little gem.

Ever wanted to be a musketeer? Well, now's your chance. Now, assuming you're lucky enough to get your mitts on a copy of this impossible-to-find adventure.

Touché takes you on the adventures of one Geoffroi le Brun, an appealingly egotistical and eager young would-be musketeer in 17th-Century France. Arriving in Rouen, wishing to join the musketeer regiment there, he is unexpectedly pulled into a murder mystery involving a purloined will, a missing heir, and a plot by an evil cardinal to overthrow the throne of France.

Touché is a DOS game, released by the equally obscure U.S. Gold, and it boasts some of the loveliest hand-painted 2D backgrounds I've seen in a game in a long time. Like Broken Sword, the game creates a rich and colorful visual tapestry that's a real pleasure to spend time in. And, like Simon the Sorcerer, each new screen makes you remember that pretty graphics didn't begin with Windows games.

The gameplay is fairly standard, third-person fare. Lots of conversation (much of it amusing, almost all of it well-performed), and lots of inventory-wrangling.

One slight twist is that you spend much of the game with a sidekick who has his own inventory, and who can, from time to time, accomplish actions on his own.

Through the course of the game, the map of France gradually opens up to you, and you get to visit places like Amiens, St. Quentin, Le Havre, and Paris; and you get to encounter gypsies, highwaymen, brigands, cutthroats, evil churchmen, an inventor named Leonardo, and a fairly hilarious fried rat-on-a-stick saleswoman.

My quibbles are minor. There's a lot of extraneous conversation in this game, much of it accompanying the considerable to-ing and fro-ing that you have to do. Luckily you can click through most of it, but it's still annoying.

Also, some of the puzzles have that obscure-third-person-inventory-fest logic that simply eludes me. Example: you need to get past some ornery soldiers that don't want you to enter a tavern. Would it occur to you that the solution was to take a melon from your inventory and throw it into the river? Me either.

There is nothing flashy about this game. It's modest in length, scope, and ambition. It's not, however, modest in quality, and in its own quiet way it sneaks up on you what a good game it really is. It's got a terrific story worthy of Alexandre Dumas, and for fans of traditional third-person adventures, it's really worth looking for.

Final Grade: B

If you liked Touché:
Watch: Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers
Read: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas Pere, of course
Play: Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templar