Martial Law

I must say, I am quite disappointed with this game. It looks as if the plot was written by someone who knows very little about this period of Polish history, and their knowledge comes from popculture. The dialogues are... stiff? They don't sound very natural, and I spotted at least a couple of spelling/syntax errors (which contributed, although not greatly, to the overall disenchantment). The game in my opinion lacks interesting elements. There's not a lot of suprises (of any kind), and the characters can't really perform any actions. You can make some decisions, but I don't think they have a significant impact on the plot (other than affecting the dialogue bits). I think the lenght of the game is a disadvantage, too. I didn't rush it, and it took me around 20 minutes. I understand that this is a free game, so it most likely won't go on for several hours, but just as I started to overlook the cons and got into the game, it ended. Positive remarks about this game: the price and the graphics. Not saying it is an aesthetic masterpiece, but I quite liked it. The music was nothing special, but not too bad.

.. there are some inacuracies. The biggest is use of "comrade" (towarzyszu) insted of "citizen" (obywatelu).

Martial Law takes a historical event or context from communist Poland in 1981 (and moves us to Christmas Day). There we meet a loving father who tries to bring his daughter a series of gifts (including a doll, tangerines and sweets). The father, apparently with some alcohol problems, does not live with his wife and daughter. Along the way, the protagonist meets a son who is disobliged to his mother, a very tender and loving mother and widow, a policeman and a woman with whom he arranges a date for Christmas. There are approximately five different endings and six (simple) achievements. The length of the game will depend on the actions and decisions you make in each game. You'll even be curious about what happens if you do or don't do this or that. I loved the story and the references were educational and very informative. I learned a bit about the communist era in Poland and how people managed to survive and not starve or die in jail for trying to defend their rights. I highly recommend it. If you can, give it a try, it's free.

Martial Law is a simple game but has a good story and blend of comedy and seriousness. The game play is basically you moving along the street and making choices about situations and people you encounter. There are faux choices in that some will end the game right there and then. I will also say that some choices are vague. For instance one person who stops you to take part in some old habit you had given up ends up with you waking up in the snow bank and a game over but I have no idea the old habit that got you there. I suspected drugs or alcohol but I read elsewhere that it was simply a debate that turned ugly. The text was vague and didn’t shed much light. The game does a good job of telling you little tidbits about Polish history from the 80’s from stores to customs and culture. The core story itself is also pretty heartwarming and it is nice to see a strong positive father figure in any media format. The graphics are pixel style but done well. The buildings; objects; and people have some detail to them. It isn’t a technical wonder but has a good style and shows why I am hard on pixel graphics games that are blurry and just look bad. The music was also fairly well done as well. The game’s opening scene auto scrolls the text instead of letting me advance manually but luckily after the opening scene this gives me control. I played Martial Law on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. You can’t manually save. There are auto save points though but the game never tells you when they occur. There is also only one save slot that gets overwritten each time. There are no graphics options at all although the game does seem to use v-sync and recognize my refresh rate. Performance wise the game ran fantastically although with the visuals I am not overly shocked. GPU Usage: 0-28 % VRAM Usage: 1129-1226 MB CPU Usage: 1-12 % RAM Usage: 4.1-4.3 GB Frame Rate: 139-165 FPS Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 | XFX RX 590 8GB | Mesa 22.3.6 | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0