The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante Reviews

Pretty good, narrative game over all. However, theres a mighty flaw somehow making the game unenjoyable over time. MILD SPOILER FOR THOSE WHO CHOSE THE CLERGY LOT IN ADOLESCENCE Once you become inquisitor, you get almost no chance to increase your theology value anymore. Right now, Im stuck at 11. Eloquence is 11 or 12 as well. Ive progressed through 50 percent of the main section of the game, the young adulthood/peacetime. Almost any significant dialogue option requiring theology wants a value of 13. I dont have that, and as I said, I get almost no chance to increase it anymore, despite constantly working with and for the church. Sometimes the few options that would increase the theology value are locked behind other requirements I unfortunately do not meet. Sry gamedevs, this makes no sense at all. Im now forced down shitty option after shitty option. If I dont want that, I would have to revert back to adolescence and grab EVERY TINY LITTLE OPPORTUNITY for another +theology I can get. So the quintessence is this: Whatever path you chose, you must be an absolute tryhard in pursuing it. There is NO Leeway in it for you. If you stray once, you are being strapped into your seat for the rest of the game and watch the narrative pass by that the DEVs have envisioned for the archetype youve chosen. The choices I was forced to make very little sense considering the background they let my character build up to this point. Im for the new faith. Yet I sometimes am forced to act like I was Emperor Nero from the roman empire reborn into the body of an inquisitor. And I mean Im truly being forced, its not like I could at least chose between several bad options, NO, I have to gulp down the WORST, because thats what weve learnt about the inquisition in history books! And you know what, that would be okay. IF you didnt let my character develop the background of a REFORMER beforehand! I understand that these types of games create an awful lot of paths to consider, and that one might lose track here and there. But this is really f*cked up. My character feels like a bipolar schizophrenic person. I would like to play another game like this from the same devs, in the hopes that they will improve on this. EDIT: SKILLCHECK FOR ELOQUENCE TO CONFESS LOVE TO SOMEONE! IM OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Brilliant game. Ending really hits home. Game facilitates self-reflection as to your characters actions and their impacts on the world, family, friends, etc. that I have rarely seen in any games. Leaves you wanting to do it all again.

Very fun, chill game for people that don't want to pointlessly shoot faceless enemies. This is more like a novel where you help write it, and it often asks you difficult questions. Thoroughly enjoyed it, and will try a different run or two in the future. I searched for "games like Pentiment" and this was one of the top results, and I agree.

The French Revolution on (well-written) steroids, If you enjoy choices matter, history, or replay value - this is a good one for you.

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante sets the bar very high for Visual novels to come. The game is crafted well and choises really do matter! You can't please everyone, and you'll have to juggle different people needs - yours included. I finished every ending on the PS4 Version, but had to play it again so I brought the steam version. Replaying it has only underlined why this game is a masterpiece, and something that's hard to find i the visual novel genre. The visuals works very well for the game, and I'm really fond of the soundtrack, which is the unsong hero of the athmosphere of this game! Worth the 20$!

Реально крутая игра, интересная история, хорошая вариативность прохождения. Но при перепрохождении не хватает пропуска того, что уже читал,

Very good game, frustrating at times due to the fact that you have a live out a destiny but overall amazing storytelling with enough choices to call it your own.

[h1]Great choice driven story game[/h1] This is a relatively linear text story game with some branching and an ability to end it prematurely. The story itself is great - the world setting, characters and events are entertaining. A player can chose his actions through the story development. But the way it works is quite flawed: Every choice is affecting some stats - so this eventually collapses to a stat management game, unfortunately. You will be forced to pick a very narrow role to adhere, otherwise game kills your character. Most of the time it is a natural choice but further into the game it might be quite frustrating feeling of having no choice at all (and being unable to play a role you've chosen). Still, this is a good story-driven game with some replay-ability.

I died unnoticed, unloved, without any acheivments and in vain. Too much like in real life but still 9/10. Minus point for [spoiler] killing the girl in the beginning [/spoiler].

Sometimes in "choices matter" games the choices don't matter enough. This is an example of a game where choices matter too much -- you either make the exact right choices at every single point of the story, or the game takes reins from you. It is just another way of stripping away player agency, and at least to me far more frustrating one. The things I really liked: the game has a lot of world lore and an interesting moral/political setup (social contract vs unquestioned tradition), they make for an excellent basis for the story. Then more ambivalent things. There's quite a lot of content. However that only means one will waste several hours during the first playthrough before inexorably sinking into the impassable quagmire that is the endgame (more of that later). The music and sound effects are sparse, but they fit the game and do enhance the mood. The illustrations are black-and-white, rather crude comic book art style ink drawings. They are not remarkable as such, but they are numerous, and they enhance the story by adding visual details (although they don't always match the text). There is also an "Animated illustrations" setting, but none of the illustrations accompanying the story have any actual animations, the entire images just move back and forth slightly, which adds nothing but distracts reading. Only the introductory screens at the beginning of each chapter are (rudimentarily) animated. Then the negative things. The beef of the game are the story and the choice mechanics. Unfortunately I grew to actively dislike the writing of this game. Writing is extremely hamfisted, void of any humor, and perfunctory. Nothing has nuances. Everything is so exaggaratingly grim that the story reads like a parody. Most characters are extremely unlikable, making it very hard to care for goals like saving your family (yet the game will punish you severely if you fail to do so). Some characters also don't act coherently, but change their personality as required by the scenes. There are scenes that actually convey something worthwhile, but they are too few and far between. Drudging through the sludge of endless forced unrefined drama intermitted by occasional info dumps first became numbing and then vexing. So it is fair to say I definitely did not enjoy the story. However, this is a matter of taste, and the choice mechanics could still make the game interesting even if the story would fail to impress. But the choice mechanics are fatally flawed. Every choice one makes in the game adds something -- stat, willpower, relationship change, destiny token. These will be needed later in the game to open more choices. All dandy so far, and for many hours this does indeed seem like a perfectly fine mechanism (the game even let's you see what you will immediately gain with each individual choice). Until, in the last third of the game, you find out that you should have made the exact right choices from the beginning of the game (but you had no way of knowing what they could possibly be at the time), otherwise you will be literally locked out of any meaningful choices for the rest of the game. So you just wasted several hours, and should now spend several hours again, and again, until you manage to find the combination of choices in all earlier phases that actually will allow you to proceed to the end of your own volition. So much for roleplaying. Unlike in most visual novels, there is no option to fast forward already seen text. The game's inner logic also goes out the window during the final third. The story starts proceeding in ways that ignore things that have occurred, and on several occasions you cannot do things that definitely should be possible with the choices made (like: I can't contact a person because he's "in hiding", even though I've hidden him myself at my workplace precisely to keep him safe and available). This ruins what little immersion and sense of agency there may have been left. This is of course just one experience. Many reviewers have enjoyed the writing; if you happen to like it, you may enjoy the game a lot more than I did. And if you are OK with this game being a (sometimes illogical) puzzle that requires arduous, very time-consuming trial-and-error choice min/maxing instead of an RPG (which it claims to be), you may like the game mechanics as well. But there is no shortage of much better story-heavy games where choices really matter in a sane way. Check out Choice of Games, for example, they offer several very enjoyable (and affordable) ChoiceScript games, such as Choice of Robots and Tin Star just to name a couple.