Choice of Rebels: Uprising
By Joel Havenstone
"You’ve run only for a minute or two when you hear the timbre of the howl grow louder, more reverberant. The hound has arrived in the hall. Then comes the echo of its panting and snuffling in the tunnel immediately behind you, its talons ringing on the stone.
The first pinch point you reach would only hamper the beast for seconds as it wriggled its great shoulders past a protruding boulder. You almost run onward…but then slow instinctively, some part of your mind sensing the possibilities. Young Earnn pauses with you, wide-eyed and breathing fast. You extend a trembling hand to him. “Your spear, Earnn. Then run on.”
In playing interactive fiction, we all weigh choices against a myriad of consequences. Every click comes with thoughts. “Will this increase my stats, is this what my character would do…” It can even make you care about the question and fear the consequences. This is what Choice of Rebels brings to the world of interactive fiction. Promise I’m not just reppin for the Joels.
When writing these, I keep a list of quotes aside that stick with me. Some positive, some negative, sometimes funny… With Choice of Rebels, I had at least 15 and all were examples of descriptive writing and imagery I wanted to share with you. So many times, you can see someone describing jealousy or desire as simply that ‘I have those feelings’, but how often do you see it described as “a sudden pang, no less insistent than the worst hunger you felt in the winter”. Take the quote in the intro, you can’t read that and not get a sense of the excitement and terror that is happening at that exact moment.
General Story:
You are thrust into the position of leader of a rebel army against a bloodthirsty regime, and the systems that support sacrificing people for the supposed safety of the realm. What beliefs guide your hand? What would you do to keep the rebellious fire stoked? You have to balance these questions and choices with a possible betrayer in your midst, playing a long game.
So much of this story is presented to you expertly in the background you experience as a child. It is so well provided to you that outside of some of the more esoteric things, you feel like you know what you need to, but are ignorant to what you don’t. And that ignorance can even be used as fuel for the rebellion, because it isn’t fair that knowledge is being kept from you. Lore dumps happen, but everything is ‘just’ close enough to something you’d have a concrete analogue to that it is extremely easy to wrap your head around uncommon words and titles like ‘helot’, ‘kurio’ or ‘Theurge’.
Format and Typos:
Extremely readable, format lends itself perfectly to lore dumps. Dialogue is always super easy to follow, and the game does enough work to let you know who anyone is to keep you from being confused. I only noticed a few instances where I had to remember who someone was, and that was during my first few playthroughs.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
Your character stats are super simplistic, but convey so much. Three skill stats, where you are great, okay, and bad. That’s it. Some personality attributes that help determine the driving force behind the rebellion (if you are truthful about it), and then a very efficiently done management system during the harshest parts of winter survival. The choices made during this may be some of the most interesting choices made in terms of balancing the health and well-being of a group against what ethics you’ve decided you’ll operate by.
All of this paired with how the groups that are still within the institution of the Hegemony view you. Do you try to maintain a good image with all of them? I mean, it might be easier to feed your rebels if you raided some noble farms… and I mean, there are some other farms owned by other landowners… It could get you through another week, and maybe free up some of your rebels to learn to read and write.
Replayability:
I’ve played this multiple times, and picking it back up to play again for the review, I got an ending I never received before. There are so many differing paths, and ways of managing your rebels, and levels of success and failure. Failure opens up new avenues as well, portions of the story you would never see if you were perfect. There are a few options for romance (it does seem like there may only be one option for a heterosexual male romance, that is a gender-variable choice). This option still has the potential to be the best one, in my opinion, just because of how well it fits within the story, and the potential for what it could be later. There are about three options in total within the story at this time, however. Better yet, the ‘big’ choices can determine whether those people will stay with you or reject you as you go too far outside of their beliefs.
Dislikes:
- Some of the mechanics options, like dedicating raiders to certain raids make it a little confusing to understand just how much food you actually need.
- As before, there is (as far as I can tell) only one romance option for a heterosexual male, which cuts down on the replayability for me as someone who tends towards the idealized self-insert. But only by an infinitesimal amount.
- The only other complaint I have is that the management portion of the title can often take so long that replaying this takes forever.
Likes:
- Every single scene is filled with so much description, from surroundings to describing how characters are feeling just through body language.
- Variability coded throughout the game based on what your character is like is always welcome. A skeptic through and through? You won’t use the name of the main deity in vain, because why would you? Maybe your reluctance to let go of homeland tradition changes up your speech. Small changes like these make reading a pleasure.
- No other story has made me question my tendency to play a pacifistic do-gooder to such an extent that I personally believe it is not the best way to play. At least this specific title. So much gray, so little black-and-white.