Videogame Storytelling
We. The Revolution
Shockingly, I have found myself deeply dissatisfied with a videogame I have played to the end and yet I cannot help but want to talk about it. Never, in my life, have I ever felt this way. And hence I must write about it.
There is something to be said about story investment, payoff, and compelling characters here, I just know it. The fact is this game managed to get me to play it until the end. It has, at least, preserved my desire to see what happens to the characters in it long enough for it to tell its whole story. But I am getting ahead of myself. Firstly, I should introduce you, dear reader, to this game.
As its name might imply, this game is set in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. You play as a judge named Alexis Fidèle, whose responsibilities are about to become a lot bloodier, since the guillotine has just been inaugurated. I will, for the most part, be sharing the spoilers of this game, especially since my deep dissatisfaction with it comes from the major plotpoints by its end. Suffice to say, however, that any passing familiarity with the French Revolution is enough for anyone to tell that heads will indeed roll.
On top of the Revolution and her many enemies, Fidèle is also a lousy father, husband and son, and he must try his best to balance the whims of his family as the sole breadwinner of his house. Seldom will you manage to find something to do which your wife, your sons and your father all approve of, but balancing loyalties is a core aspect of the game, be them those of your family, or the revolutionaries, the people and the disgruntled aristocrats.
Wonderful beginnings
My first moments playing the game were truly fantastic. I had, as far as I know, fictional cases in which I felt like I was truly picking the fairest option for the accused. Yes, there are factions in the game that want you to assign a specific fate to an accused, but you are given some leeway to act according to your own moral code for the most part.
The start of Fidèle’s story is just as compelling as the gameplay. His familial relationships are strained, his position is in jeopardy and it isn’t long before the intrigue of the Revolution forces him to play political games against his adversaries.
You are not really given a choice on whether you want to engage in intrigue or not, but at that point it hardly matters. The story does a good job convincing you that you are in danger and that you are being plotted against. It’s no different from a player in an adventuring game being attacked by an entity with a red health bar on its head; you already know what you must do. This lack of choice will, however, ruin it all for me later on.
Regardless, while you plot against your enemies and deliver sentences to the unruly Parisian court, the story progresses. You are even placed on a pyramid, a hierarchy of sorts comprised of historical, prominent revolutionaries whose personalities and loyalties seemed to be for the most part accurate. At the top of this pyramid, Robespierre eventually does away with your option to sentence people to prison, thus most likely ensuring you will be sending more and more souls to the guillotine from then on.
I really like the portrayal of your progress through the revolutionary ranks. Beating your competitors, crossing over their portraits and slowly making your way to the top. There are no real privileges for this climb, unlike real life, but it feels nice to overcome the intrigue challenges presented before you, even if all you do is the same persuasion minigame each time.
All in all, the game offers you a bunch of tasks to juggle, and most of them are pleasant enough to make you want to keep playing. From trials, to intrigue to expanding your influence in the Parisian streets, nothing feels especially awful about the game. I would even confidently say I was enjoying it thoroughly this far, since it is quite obvious the game comes from a place of love and passion for the history and the story it tries to tell. Things only take a turn halfway through the first chapter.
Okay, but how much of a choice do I really have?
My interest was peaked when I found out I was going to be the person who would judge Louis XVI, in-game better known as Louis Capet or Citizen Capet. Part of me wondered if I could just let him go. Obviously, I was aware this would be a tremendously unpopular choice, but given I’d sided with the people on multiple occasions before, I felt confident.
I tried my best to ask the accused only benevolent questions, but it is a woefully tough case. Halfway through the trial, a revelation ensures that the people and the jury all demand Louis’s head. You can technically get away with jailing him (though your drop in popularity might be such that your game will end right away), but acquitting him is a guaranteed death for you at the hands of an enraged mob.
This didn’t feel as bad when it happened as it feels when it is weighed with all the other times your choices are limited in this game. I understood the people’s rage and the heat of the moment leading to vigilantism and calls for blood, and it felt thematically appropriate to be subject to the whims of a crowd as a revolutionary judge.
I didn’t find too many issues with the remaining cases of the chapter, though Capet’s trial changed something in me. After that point, I started treating my influence with the factions as the key aspect of my sentences. All other aspects, including the case itself, took a backseat as I tried to maintain a high relationship with the three factions mentioned above.
If this was intentional, to demonstrate how people’s lives matter less than political affiliation, then it was still poorly done. It happens too soon and too fast for me to truly feel like it is thematically intentional. More importantly, it is represented in abstract bars, rather than words. You could be given notes, threats from aristocrats or revolutionaries asking for a particular person to be forgiven or punished. It would at least make the political loyalties feel organic, rather than a stat that you must maintain for meta reasons. As it stands, the system fails to convey much other than a gameplay aspect that must be balanced, and any semblance of justice left my thoughts before the first chapter was done.
The lack of a choice strikes again later on. For multiple reasons, you keep finding yourself pitted against political opponents further up in the aforementioned pyramid. Never do you really have the chance to renounce these political games. You either play and win, or play and lose. Most of the time, the game starts because you are attacked in some way, but the lack of choice on the matter never becomes more blatant than when you take on Robespierre.
I genuinely cannot stress enough how shocked I was when the character just opted to turn against the face of the Revolution. There seemed to be no provocation, no warning sign and no conflict to begin with. We later find out Alexis has a bit of a problem with excessive ambition, but it makes no sense to berate the player for all the scheming they made if there was no choice!
Of course, you will win against Robespierre (because you must), and you even get to try him. Personally, I had learned from Capet, and since everyone wanted his execution and my standing with the factions was lousy, I didn’t even try to spare him this time around. Your climb through the pyramid is not affected by your choices, though it seems to be treated as the player’s fault for happening throughout the whole game.
Shooting the shaggy dog
It is worth noting that, despite my growing cynicism towards the impact of my choices, the story still had me gripped. I cared about the Fidèles and their struggles and I wanted to at least be a good patriarch since my job as a judge was clearly compromised by the need to appease three bloodthirsty factions.
You will be happy to know that there is nothing you may do to prevent your youngest son’s death. And by happy, I mean devastated. The revelation of your son’s death is one of the game’s tools to ensure you act ruthlessly at a given point in the story. Unfortunately, this takes place in court, and as we all know, the choice of the court is not really yours to make, you’re just the figurehead who gets to pull the rope.
Giving the game some credit, your son’s death does create a difficulty spike, since he was the one whom you had to please to ensure your other relatives liked you a bit better. After the boy’s death, I recall never quite managing to make my family simultaneously like me all at once ever again.
The story of the Fidèles only takes a nose dive by its end. Hell, I’ll say the whole game’s story plummets thanks to the same element. During the second chapter, you finally meet the main antagonist of this game, though you may be surprised to even learn there is one. Bruno Fidèle, your brother, is a not-so-dead soldier whose issues with your father become your problem by virtue of you being the least awful son. More on that later.
I’d like to really know why the developers thought this wonderful story needed an antagonist. Until Bruno came along, my ‘antagonist’, if I had to force that role upon anything, would either be the Parisians, the Revolution or even the aristocrats lurking in the shadows. French society during this time is so unstable there is no shortage of obstacles for a judge to overcome. The last thing I felt the story needed was an outsider as an enemy.
The inclusion of Bruno lessens everything about this story. It is thoroughly ridiculous to expect an audience to believe that a broken, crippled deserter could orchestrate the whole French Revolution, all in order to spite his father and destroy his brother.
Robespierre? He was an idiot, a pawn in Bruno’s game. Louis Capet? His government had no real issues to bring about a revolution, Bruno just toppled it for his own ends. All the other people on the pyramid? They’re all just dumber than you and far dumber than Bruno, who orchestrated their demise by your hand. Marat? A gullible moron who believes Bruno’s word against a judge’s. The Parisians? All of them fools that apparently cried for the blood of everyone Bruno told them to. Everything in the story has been diminished just to add a conspiracy element that is entirely unnecessary.
By the end, Bruno’s power is so unbelievable I don’t think anyone can really afford to care. He apparently amasses an army large enough to storm Paris and kill hundreds of thousands of people. He even seems to have an annoying relationship with the fourth wall, berating you, the player, for not having read the case files recently and simply sentencing people according to political convenience. This is a character that might work in a game like Undertale, but not in a historical setting.
It doesn’t really matter what you do when facing Bruno, taking us once again to the topic of there being no choice. Your troops will not be able to hold off his assault. You are basically forced to watch as he destroys Paris and the death toll rises. Even losing before the game “expects” you to changes nothing. All that matters is that you go through the motions and wait until Napoleon shows up to obliterate Bruno’s magic army.
Even seeing Bruno’s forces wiped out has its satisfaction cut short. What little joy you can get out of it is destroyed when Bruno’s supernatural awareness kicks in and he gives you one last impossible prediction of how Napoleon will be the new dictator, just as he wanted. The fact that this happens by the end, right before the game and story are settled, only made me apathetic towards the outcome of the last minigame.
The fate of the Fidèles
With all the nasty things I said about Bruno, some of you might be wondering why I kept going. There are, after all, three chapters, and he appears in the second one. The answer is that I assumed there’d be a choice… somewhere, a choice to fix your increasingly dire family life, to actually defeat Bruno, poorly written as he was, or even to just try and make Paris slightly less awful.
I was given no such choice. If anything, it was with increasing frustration and decreasing investment that I watched the Fidèles be broken apart regardless of my actions. Bruno’s own introduction couldn’t be more fitting; he appears just as you are given a mock choice to stop him from amputating your remaining son’s hands. All you must do is win a game of dice.
To call this a choice is to say losing at the casino is a choice. The dice, as far as I know, felt extremely rigged. No matter how many times I attempted it, the first round always went to Bruno, while the second one went to me (meaning one hand goes and one stays). This is a terrible way to create a branching story. Even when it is not a branching story, then it is simply a terrible way to implement a minigame.
RNG should never be in charge of deciding how a story goes. If this isn’t RNG, and the dice are loaded, then it shouldn’t be a minigame, but a cutscene. I wouldn’t mind Bruno’s stupid dice game half as much if it had simply been a tense cutscene between him and Alexis, where the latter comes to the haunting realization that his son is going to be a cripple. This wouldn’t fix Bruno, but it would at least be less infuriating.
The rest of the family share a similar fate that you can’t save them from. Your youngest son dies, no matter what. Your oldest son leaves you after being crippled, holding you accountable for something you had no chance of preventing. Your wife has an affair and tries to murder you, even if you stay on good terms with her throughout the whole game. Sparing her from the guillotine will not change anything. I have to laugh when your own father acknowledges his guilt for Bruno’s bitterness and says he will stay by your side until the end, but still has his opinion of you lowered after he is done talking.
Even your own fate is not really your choice. After being stabbed by your wife, yes, you can choose to die in a scene I would probably appreciate more if I wasn’t furious with the game by then. However, if you choose to live and play to the end, your last stand is made through yet another game of dice with, you guessed it, Bruno. While this one doesn’t feel rigged, it still suffers from the same problem of having dice decide how a story goes. I felt nothing when my dice betrayed me yet again and Alexis was shot. By then, I was too tired of it all to be invested.
Conclusion
I don’t know why I wrote this, or why it had to be this long. Still, I believe this game stands as a proper example of what not to do when you want to have your players head in a certain direction. It showed me what may happen when people lose their invesment in a story and its characters. It showed me what happens when the stakes are gradually removed from an otherwise gripping story. It showed me how badly a poorly thought out twist can mangle a story even when you yourself are the protagonist.
