The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante

In the first few chapters I was amazed by The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante. The story branching was fantastic in that I could tell from a logical standpoint why certain choices were not available to me based on my actions and it did a great job of making me make tough choices. Chapter iv saw me take a dislike to the game though as I feel railroaded. No matter what I have tried to choose I end up by the 27th year with a true death and no way around it. This highlights the game’s poor save system in my eyes. You get one save slot and the game auto saves. It doesn’t tell you when it saves and if you want to restart from earlier you have to redo entire chapters. At this point I would have to pretty much start a whole new game and make drastically different choices to get into a different type of life. My problem with that is that if going into certain types of life you get result in getting stuck in chapter IV and not being able to get to chapter V then why even have them ? Proper story branching, in my eyes, should mean we all get to the end but our journey there is different and our outcome can vary. In this case though I can’t even get to the end. I will say that the game does it’s personality system very well. There are a great variation of traits and they can effect a variety of outcomes. The characters were for the most part interesting. I did feel that some of the side stories got a bit boring. I felt that too many side characters got introduced in chapter iv that didn’t see much use. It just made the story feel bloated. The presentation of the game was good. I liked how the game was basically a book with each scene a turn of the page. The voice acting for Brante was a bit wooden. The music was decent but repetitive as were the sound effects. One last thing I want to touch on is that the game has no skip option for text. For a game with no manual saves and that makes me repeat entire chapters to change anything this is unacceptable.

This is a beutiful text RPG! It feels like Disco Elisium, a simpler version of it. Here you can find charming music, nice story and cozy GUI. I belive that this game is the finest text RPG i have ever seen ^_^ P.S. I have played this game in Steam and i am going to buy it in this store too =)

Game has a solid story and characters, dialogs are well writen, they arent nothing groundbreaking, but are honest, and sound like something ordinary people may say. Game has many paths you can take, but most of them will be blocked based on the amount of skills points you have. In the end, you arent making decisions on what Brante is doing, but rather give him some poitns and observe where he goes from there. First 2 chapters serve the role of stat gathering, so they have many choices avalible. Hoverver every chapter after that offers less and less options. It is common for diferent RPG games to become more focused at the end, offering less avalibilities to offtrack, but they also usually reward your choices. It is not the case here, unless you go minmaxing route, acquiring just enought points to be able to make a specific decision at a specific point. This wouldnt be as problematic if not for arbitrary distribution of points. I was playing New Faith priest route, and most of the decisions releted to New Faith required Eloquence. However, most of the choices I was making, that was I think in character, were rewarding me with Theology. It didnt seem to be a problem in chapter 3, where requirements werent high, and usually only prohibited something of entirely diferent route. I was able to make all of New Faith choices there. However in chapter 4, at the very begining, when my character is asked about who will he support, Old or New Faith, I dont have enough Eloquence points to chose New Faith. I propably didnt have enough eloquence, because I didnt choose specific options in first 2 chapters, that would translate to additional points, my starting eloquence was indeed low, and I didnt manage to get eoungh of them by the end of chapter 3. Now funny enough, things like this dont have much impact on narration. You are ardent supporter of change in church? This matters not, welcome to Inquisition, hope you will help us maintain the old order. Word limit, not worth it.

Good game, though the math near the end of this game ruins the experience. Anyway, I give it 5 stars cause I have enjoyed the story and playing it. Thanks for the latest patch! Now I can set up a proper resolution on my Macbook M2 with Crossover!

I've seen some complaints about being "railroaded" or certain goals being unachievable or too many characters. I disagree with these. You're a character in a fleshed-out world, obviously you can't totally change everything through sheer force of will. I imagine some events always happen to one degree or another, but it makes sense. Other characters exist with their own motivations and decisions and that plays out. You have some ability to influence it, but that all depends on how far you're willing to go and what sacrifices you're willing to make. Which brings me to some goals being unachievable. You can do certain things, but you need to make sacrifices to get them. Yeah, you can't be besties with your lowborn sister and take her side in everything while simultaneously appeasing your stodgy grandfather and older brother and become a high ranking noble. You have to pick sides and commit to things for which there will be consequences. Your choices matter and you can't do everything perfectly, which is precisely the point of the game. The game even tells you outright at the beginning, you won't be able to do everything you want and you will have to deal with consequences of your actions. It feels like a real life. As for too many characters, I noticed there were more than a few that I had little no to no interaction with and they didn't play a part in my story even though I thought they would (one in particular comes to mind where the consequence literally said: "She will remember you" and I never saw her again), but I've only played through this game once so far and as far as I can tell there are many different paths you can take after adolescence. Depending on decisions you make you will have less/more interactions with certain characters. I look forward to another playthrough to see what the other paths look like. I do have a few quibbles: don't love the save function, would like more voice acting, typos in text. Overall though I thought it was very enjoyable.