Imagine two seconds, you die and then you meet La Mort who offers you a deal ... strange: live a full day by manually managing your motor functions to be resuscitated. Usually, you put one leg in front of the other, breathe without really thinking about it, and blink your eyes regularly enough to avoid crying and blurry vision.
In Manual Samuel, say goodbye to all that, you will have to think about carrying out these actions on your own so that Samuel can hope to live this damn day which will allow him to come back to life. And I can assure you, it drives you crazy!
Our character is presented as a "good-for-nothing", rich heir to a family that owns an empire, who takes advantage of daddy's money to hang out and waste the money by spinning $ 5000 tips to the waiter at the cafe in district. Which has the gift of annoying his girlfriend, who will throw a beautiful brick in her face. Samuel will get up somehow, with a concussion, to try to find his sweetheart and apologize ... but a truck will hit him before he reaches his goal. Direction hell, where he will meet Death who will offer him the deal presented in the introduction.
So we find Sam one fine morning, almost naked and in a bad state ... and unable to move without our help. A pressure on the up arrow, crunch of the knees, one stands up, second pressure of the key "up arrow", crunch of back, Samuel is standing and turns blue. "Press X to breathe in", "Press A" to breathe out. The screen lights up gradually, press "B" to blink.
You will understand, each action must be done by you, and by step. One pressure for the left leg, another for the right, and no failure otherwise it is the guaranteed gadget for our "dashing" character. The beginning of the adventure is satisfied with making us live harmless actions: getting up, washing, urinating, having lunch, dressing ... But everything becomes trying for our character, and we experience this through different mini - more or less interesting games (urinating without touching the toilet and without putting our feet up, for example). The commands are explained at the start of the level quite clearly, but the overbidding sometimes means you get lost. Of course, it can quickly become an ordeal to coordinate all the actions (breathing, blinking, driving with the gear shift, dodging obstacles, it quickly becomes a nightmare!).
The adventure will climb crescendo, with quite funny levels, if not really inspired (except the last installment which revisits Hell and which will manage to tear you away from a few laughs), like driving a vehicle, mini-games associated with work, and so on!
We don't get bored in Manual Samuel, the game manages to renew itself and to end before the redundancy is too much felt. Allow around 3 hours to complete the single player campaign. A cooperation mode and a Time Trial are on the program to try to beat his record times with our puppet character.
What I take away from the title Perfectly Paranormal is its narration. A narrator punctuates the adventure from A to Z, commenting on the actions of our character, with quite incisive humor and unfailing involvement. The tone of voice is always perfect, the jokes hit the mark, in my opinion this is the strong point of the game.
Manual Samuel is an interesting experience to live: funny, original, not too long in view of the genre, it's a little pleasure at a relatively affordable price. Count around ten euros on PC, Xbox One (note that the game joined the Xbox Game Pass program on September 1), PS4 and Nintendo Switch.
