We. The Revolution: This Game Has Lost Its Head

We. The Revolution:

We. The Revolution: This Game Has Lost Its Head

We. The Revolution: A Riot of Mini-Games

We. The Revolution: An Absurdly Executed Fiction

Time to Beat: 12.2 Hours

Why do video game reviewers (those that earn a living writing reviews) review games they won't enjoy. I've watched Yahtzee Croshaw's videos, I've a good idea of what he enjoys and what he hates. Then he picks a game I know he will despise. It's not just AAA games, this problem includes popular and obscure indie games.

We. The Revolution, isn't a game I knew I would dislike in advance. I wouldn't play a game I suspected I'd despise. But I knew before the first head was violently separated from its body, that We. The Revolution wasn't a game I'd recommend.

We, set during the French Revolution, is the first game developed by Polish mini-developer, Polyslash. The publisher, Klabater, has a larger catalog, with a revealing flaw. Of the eleven games on Steam, seven of them earned a “Mixed” rating from users. More than half of the games on Steam have a Very Positive Ranking (80% to 94% of reviewers gave it a thumbs up). Any game with a Mixed rating (40%-69%) is dodgy. I'll try any particular Mixed game. But watch out for a developer that produces a majority of games with a Mixed rating.

When I began I hadn't reviewed the publisher's record, and We. The Revolution has a Mostly Positive rating, with 78% of 1,237 voluntary reviewers choosing a thumbs up over a thumbs down.Set in Paris, the prologue barely introduces the core mechanics. The player starts by choosing a name. I assumed this was because I was designing my character. Instead, the prologue reveals the protagonist fully formed; drunk, gambler, husband, father, and judge, Alexis Fidele. We. The Revolution's core mechanic is passing judgment on others. Both the protagonist, and their cases live in difficult circumstances, testing the player's moral mettle. Games in this genre, like Papers, Please, prefer a blank slate protagonist so the player can imprint their own personality. We. The Revolution discards this preference for a fully formed lead character. Even as the player tries to make their mark on the game world, the developers place unwanted words into my mouth. They force the player to defend choices I would prefer not to make, and to accept the script the developer has written. The developer wants the player to play their part, like an actor. 

Because the player can't make significant moral choices (in what is clearly a game where the player is supposed to feel the impact of their decisions), I can't relate to my character. The goal is to make the player consider the depth their character can sink to, and make them feel like the bad guy. It doesn't work if the player is always given two evil choices they want to reject. A famous iteration of this style is Spec Ops: The Line. In the latter the game tricks the player, convincing them of the necessity of committing morally gray actions, while subverting the player's expectations. It sets them up and then judges them. We. The Revolution may be attempting the same trick, but it fails because the situation isn't convincing. We introduces a specific character to judge the player, but this foil is so absurd it fails. The ending of the game partially vindicates the player, further reducing its moral impact. Yeah, I hurt people, but I was also able to embrace leniency as a judge. The game doesn't recognize my mercy. Simultaneously, I'm prevented from picking my allies or my enemies. The only choice is to side with cruel, power hungry cretins.

To survive the turbulence of revolutionary Paris, the player must appease three factions; the common folk, the aristocrats, and the revolutionaries. Each has an opinion bar. The numbers on it are unclear. If the opinion of any faction ends the day at zero, the player loses the game. The value doesn't matter aside from this. A 1 is as good as 100. Unfortunately, factions are fickle, and their allegiance to the player is very temporary. Their numbers bounce around like a roller coaster. In a single trial the protagonist can lose a third of the entire bar, but in the next, gain back half again. There is no gradual build up of alliances. There is no connection of relationships, no flow. There is no memory but only the immediate now in the minds of the factions. While the relationships of the factions are largely in the player's control, and this is good, since this is the main way to win the game, there are random events that alter the numbers without any reason. We. The Revolution is separated into a three act structure with the cliched titles of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite. Each lasts about fifteen to twenty days. In the first Act most days feature a trial. Trials are the core game play element, and the dominant determinate for how the three factions view the protagonist. A trial starts with a view from the judge's bench, through the eyes of Alexis. The player sees the prosecutor (Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville), the nameless jury, the various well-to-do onlookers, and the accused. A file, provided by Tinville, explains the case in brief. First the player must discover questions to ask the accused. Clicking on the accused, certain details from the file are highlighted. Here the player must play an intuition based matching game. The player must match details such as; adding water to wine, the innkeeper, or rotten apples, to investigative concepts such as; accuse, evidence, counter-revolution, or offender's personality. Neither of these lists of examples are exhaustive, but give a general idea of their contents. When the player correctly connects a detail and an investigative concept the player is granted a question. If the player chooses incorrectly, it counts as a mistake. After a few mistakes the player is prohibited from attempting further connections. Initially it is difficult for the player to intuit the developer's intent, but with practice it becomes absurdly simple to predict. This difficulty in the beginning means there is almost no game, since with no connections there are no questions, which means no trials, which means no game. The end of the game is equally frustrating, because it is too easy. There is also no game, just clicking through a series of dialogue boxes. If the player fails to unlock enough questions, if they make too many mistakes, I recommend quitting the game and reloading. We. The Revolution makes a new save file at the start of every day.

The player can ask questions as soon as they unlock them, and alternate making connections with asking questions, but it's better to wait to ask questions until the player has unlocked all of them. The point of the trial isn't to uncover the truth, but to determine the outcome. When a trial begins, the player should check the verdict book. If the player preselects each of the three verdicts, We shows how the three factions react. During the trial the judge decides the final verdict, but the jury develops an opinion. A successful judge needs their choice to align with the jury's opinion. Each question shows how it will affect the jury's opinion. The questions themselves, the story the accused tells, is irrelevant. The player needs to lead the jury, asking only the questions that influence them to the player's predetermined outcome. The player needs to let the jury have no opinion but what they decide in advance.

The questions themselves are, as I said, irrelevant. On rare occasions a question brings a witness to the stand, but at least three quarters of questions are answered by the accused. The order of the questions has no impact on the defendant's reaction. Witnesses and the accused never change their story, never break down, and the questions don't create any progress or flow. Questions don't interact with each other building on past knowledge. A person might confess to murder with one question, but responds to the following question as if they hadn't made that confession. Because of this lack of connective tissue, the player doesn't learn anything of consequence. Trials are not mysteries to be solved, and the game doesn't really care if the verdict is correct. While the accused are relatively transparent about their case, We. The Revolution doesn't concern itself with the truth.

More on We. The Revolution soon.

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