Révolution Diabolique
By Chris Conley
”No one at the table seems particularly enthusiastic about your plan. But lacking any serious proposals from others, it is eventually agreed upon, and the meeting moves on.
It’s a disaster.”
I saw a derivation of the above quote so… many… times. Some titles like wearing their stat systems out on their sleeves, while some wear sleeves and ruffles and powder makeup. Révolution Diabolique is the latter. I think Marie-Antoinette once famously said, “Let them read code”. But probably in French, not English.
General Story:
Welcome to revolutionary-era France, where you choose what sort of character you are and how you’ll affect the fledgling world of democracy. Oh, and you summon demons. While there isn’t much dialogue in the game, the majority of it takes place in sort of episodic side stories. Intermissions are actually periods where you learn a little bit about the alt-history revolution, and make decisions based on your character’s opinion. Sometimes this can actually affect where France and the surrounding nations end up. Or it might affect where your head and body end up.
This works so well. Everything is well written, and until you’ve gone through the game a few times, it will feel wildly different if you choose different paths. There is so much potential in the theme and era.
Format and Typos:
Easily readable. Little dialogue, but what is there is really easy to read. You choose a decision, and most of the time the action is explained in results afterwards (such as the intro quote). If there were any typos at all, I didn’t see a single one.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
Oh, boy. This game is a perfect example of one thing working so well and another dragging it down. Game stats are initially portrayed like Storyteller games. Pips with no numbers. So, in my final game, I had 5 pips in Stratégie et Tactique. You can change this to a numeric value, which would be a ranking of 10. I had seen numbers up to a max of 20, but this is where I want to talk a little bit about code. I know the majority of you won’t pop open code and follow it, but I like to do it after playing through the title blind to look at styles and different commands. Basically, it is both cheating and learning. I talked about in the introduction how many times I failed. In some other games, I can learn why in the code. In this title? I did worse with the code open than closed. I’ll never post direct code, but let’s look at what I read as difficulty checks in a late game chapter. So, tough checks have a difficulty of 14 (these checks appear to become more difficult as the game progresses, so a tough check in an early chapter has a lower required score than an upper ranking). You can get 10 in a stat within the first chapter of the game, and you get multiple opportunities to raise stats throughout. But I was still consistently failing throughout the title. Best I can tell? Other hidden stats influence your ability to pass tests. Sometimes I felt like I had double or triple in a stat as to what I needed to pass, and still failed as a disaster. This is compounded by stats just not being very clear. How much influence is a lot of influence? How many favors did I earn with a government employee by saving their life before they hate me? This is a game that seems to want to punish you for trying to optimize stats, but simultaneously require that you do it meticulously to succeed.
Replayability:
And I hate that I have such an issue with understanding how stats work, and what hidden stats are there, because the options the game provides to you are absolutely amazing. I want to explore every single path the game offers, from peasant to bourgeoisie. From selfish overt summoner, to discreet seeker of immortal life.
The only issue I have with replayability is that certain NPC’s have randomized genders that you have no influence over, so if you meet a focused academic who you’d like to romance the next time you play, they may not be the same gender the next time around. And it’s going to take you 15 to 30 minutes to find that out.
Dislikes:
- Opaque stats, hidden stats, and success requirements that require familiarity with spreadsheets and formulas means you’ll read the words, “it’s a disaster” more times than you want to.
- Forced randomized gender variability for NPCs, instead of the fairly standard options in most other titles.
- If you’ve noticed, I haven’t mentioned demons that much. It’s because you can very easily focus on other things in this game, like politics or government work, and have the ‘diabolique’ portion of the title be almost a footnote.
Likes:
- The theme and era combo is amazing. The history and intrigue along with the promise of arcane happenings, magnefique!
- Even if I can’t do all the things well, I want to do ALL THE THINGS. I mean, I want to do them well, but there has never been a playthrough that didn’t end with me going something like… “I wonder how a noble who supports the monarch would do if I focused on joining the military and building a demon-enhanced army would work?” after finishing playing a peasant who was just interested in rubbing my rival’s face in the dirt and maybe escaping France before the next war kicked off. So much diversity in each playthrough.
- Seriously, the amount of content tucked away in this game that you may end up never seeing if you don’t replay it, is immense.
The announcement thread appears to have the writer talking (in June 22) about releasing additional content for the game, so that might be something to look forward to.