We. The Revolution

I'm no French speaking, so I leave translation issues to posh Frenchmen. The game is actually very engaging and full of complex and dubious choices. You are thrown in the middle of the revolution, just before the Luis XVI is brought to the guillotine. You have past as drunkard and a very strong willed wife; both affecting your reputation. In all this you need to deal with the revolutionary party, angry common folks, political intrigue and more. It is very easy to do a miss step and everything you do can spell doom or success on you career, family or even your life: being a judge in the revolution is no easy task. The game provides many aspects that you need to care about: even the questions can be used to manipulate the final verdict from jury. Each defendant got also a different personality: more vocal. Stern. Passionate. This, in turn, will change the answers they'll provide and provides you an opportunity to sway the whole jury moving from innocence or guiltiness. But you need to pilot the jury and audience to what is actually the best choice of you, and your family, without being blatant. Add to this gossips about you, your family or even habits: everything is a balance. Aside the game very intriguing, the whole experience is a very deep look into a defining moment of human history. The developers did a very thorough job in depicting how should have been at the time. The art style is also very fitting. Not overly glamorous, but surely captivating. If you like the genre, I would go for it

So, I initally really liked this. You play as a revolutionary judge during the Terror in revolutionary France, and it's a decent, if not particularly in depth simulation of the madness of that time. Very quickly your priority becomes preserving your own hide rather than meting out justice, and it honestly becomes pretty chilling how coldly you find yourself distorting the very concept of justice for each trial. The verdict is almost always decided within a few moments of the trial beginning and you seeing how the various factions breathing down the back of your neck feel about the possible outcomes, actually giving the defendant an in depth cross examination is usually not even worth the time as it could influence the jury and put them at loggerheads with you. To add to this, the character you play as is, to put it nicely, a social climing viper, and as the game progresses the court cases almost fade into background noise as you get sucked into an increasingly high stakes series of intrigues with various other important personages in Paris. It plays out quite non linearly, it does tend to feel a little too easy and too simplistic, but you could say that for the game as a whole, on a whole it still manages to be very engaging and quite gripping. It also has a very nice art style and music. Sadly, towards the end of the second act, things begin to go very wrong. The intrigues basically solve themselves, and then a character who feels like the human personification of shadow the hedgehog randomly shows up and destroys the entire third act. He's secretly behind everything, although neglects to give a single detail as to why, and feels like he walked in out of a particularly bad anime. It completly ruined what was a flawed but pretty decent game up to that point.

Would you condemn a man to death just to keep a baying mob from killing you instead? That kind of moral dilemma is at the heart of this game and frankly is deeply relevant to today's political climate. As a judge in Revolutionary France you have to balance maintaining your reputation (and personal safety) with passing the sentences you feel are actually warranted. Is the game simplistic? Yes. But engage with it and don't just think of it as a game about keeping the little bars in the positive, instead REALLY try to imagine what it is like to hold a man or woman's life in your hands while outside pressures try to influence your decision. I have knocked a star off for the price though, it should be at least half that so maybe wait for a sale.

Right off the bat, this game is visually incredible. The characters are expressive and lifelike, and the unique style has a ton of visual interest without ever being distracting. While a few gameplay elements aren't immediately obvious, the game ramps up complexity at a nice pace so that it never feels overwhelming. Several mechanical layers begin to stack and make for a balancing act of priorities akin to Papers, Please (but it relies on careful decisions rather than snap judgements). Reccomend!

* Ubuntu Mate 18.04 * CPU: Intel i5-2500K 3.30 GHZ * RAM: 8 GB * HD: 1 TB SSD * Vid: Nvidia 960 GTX | Driver: 430.40 This game is also on Steam and it states on the store page there that it does not work on Linux unless in windowed mode. I am playing this game on my main machine and HTPC machines in full screen without issue. The above specs are from the lower end HTPCs. This is a first for me in this genre but the trailer caught my eye and I had to give it a shot when it went on sale for $14.99. The game is easily worth the original $19.99. Excellent job. I've not ended this game but I've been playing it 1 case a day to let the setting sink in. I also started re-reading 'A People's History of the United States' because of this game. The game is great looking, the voice acting is solid and the atmosphere of the cases has me full of suspense and tension for each decision I make. Great job, devs!