Sfinx

About the game

Sfinx is a point-and-click adventure from Poland, about two kids who live in the same apartment block. It begins with Vincent at his computer, one move away from winning, when the screen goes dark. The whole building has lost power: the lift is dead, the doorbells are silent and the stairwell is pitch black.

He is not the only one wondering what happened. Anna, his friend from across the landing, wants to know too, and the answer comes from an absent-minded professor in a wheelchair who mumbles riddles and lectures on quantum mechanics. According to him, a very small alien in a flying saucer took a wrong turn, fell through a black hole and landed in our world, and the blast knocked out every electric device around. If nobody finds the way back, the little visitor stays stranded.

So the two set out to help, through the building, the street, a petrol station, a garage and stranger places further on, collecting odd objects and trading favours with the neighbours. Those neighbours are most of the fun: a grumpy old lady, a pair of lads who want their ball back, a mechanic fed up with flying carpets, and a Persian princess whose carpet will not fly.

You play both children and switch between them at any time. Each has their own pockets, and some jobs only one of them will take on, so a lot of the puzzles come from deciding who does what.

Sfinx comes from the same Polish studio and engine family as Sołtys, its earlier and smaller adventure; ScummVM runs it with the CGE2 engine, the second version of that engine.

Playing it here

This is the English version 1.1, the freeware translation that L.K. Avalon released through the ScummVM project. It runs in ScummVM, compiled for the browser, with the original game files unchanged.

The first load takes a while: the game data is about 34 MB, plus about 6 MB for the engine, and everything downloads before the game starts. A bar shows the progress. Your saved games and settings stay in this browser.

The voices are in Polish. The English version kept the original Polish recordings and shows the English text in speech bubbles. If you would rather read in silence, the buttons on the control panel at the bottom of the screen turn the voices (or the subtitles) off, and also set music and sound volume.

A mouse helps. Everything is done with the left button, so a tap works for most of the game, but with a mouse the name of whatever is under the pointer appears on the panel, which is how you spot what can be used.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Point at everything. The name on the panel tells you what the game considers worth clicking, and the scenes are full of small objects that are easy to miss.

Try it with the other child. Anna and Vincent react differently to the same thing; one of them may refuse a job the other is happy to do. If someone answers with a joke instead of an action, switch characters before you give up.

Only four pockets each. When a child's pockets are full, they cannot pick anything else up. Use up what you no longer need, or let the other child pick the next thing up.

Listen to the professor. Between the riddles, he says what he needs to work out the way home, and repeats the list until he has it all.

Credits and licence

Sfinx was developed and published in Poland by Laboratorium Komputerowe Avalon (L.K. Avalon) in 1997, for DOS, with code by Janusz B. Wiśniewski. L.K. Avalon later released it as freeware, together with the ScummVM project, under a licence that allows free distribution with the licence and notices intact. The English translation is by Arnaud Boutonné and Thierry Crozat. The original licence file is linked from this page. All game content is © Laboratorium Komputerowe Avalon.

The game runs in ScummVM, by the ScummVM Team, free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. We compile it for the browser with only the engines our games use; the complete source code of this build is linked from the licences page.