Carte Blanche: First Episode - For a Fistful of Teeth

Raised in a bourgeois family and only recently graduated, young Edgar Delacroix still has to discover what life has in store for him. Set in the 1920s, he leaves his home to build a life in the city of Montreal. He applies for a job at a private investigation agency, where he is hired by Gaspard Lemaître and his sadistic chain-smoking secretary Jeannine. Soon, he learns the tricks of the trade and works his way through cases to earn money.

For a Fistful of Teeth is the first episode in the noir Carte Blanche click-and-point adventure series by independent developer Absurdus. The game is done completely in black and white, using a letterboxed format, with constant grain slightly distorting the image. Despite the serious setting, the characters' disproportional profiling and voice acting is over the top, with humourous puzzles and loopholes - rendering it a B-movie feel.

Most of the game is shown through a 1st-person perspective, with Myst-style drawn static images, combined with action-triggered animations. All of the actions are controlled through the left mouse button. Hover over an item and click to reveal the possible actions - to examine it, pick it up or use it. Although Edgar has an inventory, logical item-based actions are shown inside the game, and it is not needed to select or combine items. There are no time limitations, no action puzzles, and Edgar cannot die.

A slight layer of RPG elements is applied over the game. Edgar starts as a complete nitwit, but can learn skills and competences, either through performing actions or observing other characters' behaviour. All competences are added to his resume, and they range from "naivété" - the only skill Edgar starts with, at level 11 - and bitterness, to spying, examination, persuasion, deduction, sensuality, and, of course, ventriloquism and taxidermy. These competences appear when solving puzzles or during conversations. When multiple skills can be used, the player can craft Edgar to a certain playing style.

For a Fistful of Teeth was intended as the first part of a series where each installment would introduce independent sets of cases, with an underlying storyline through all games. Unlike similar games however, the player would be able to continue the second episode with Edgar's competences of the first game - providing character building over multiple games. At the end of the episode, players can export the competences to a save file to be used in future episodes. Even though multiple episodes were announced, only one was released and as such most of the described features remained unused.