1979 Revolution: Black Friday

Genre: Interactive Story-Driven Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Digerati Indie Darling Bundle Vol. 3, along with Nefarious, Omega Strike, and Shikhondo – Soul Eater.)

1979 Revolution: Black Friday is an Interactive Story-Driven Adventure comparable to the likes of Telltale’s games like The Walking Dead, however in 1979 Revolution, the game’s story is focused on letting players explore a real-world event recreated based on historical photos and interviews with the people who lived it, and in some cases died in it.

Players take the role of a photojournalist living in Iran during the lead-up to, and aftermath of, the Iranian Revolution. It’s an extremely eventful time in history that’s sadly not very well-known to many Western audiences, which makes it a particularly interesting time to focus a game on, and as such the game at times feels just as much like a history lesson as it feels like an interactive story.

To some extent, this is intentional. The game makes it a point to show its work, allowing you to compare the photos your character takes to real photos of the events as they unfolded in real life. The game toes the line between enough information to make things immersive, and juuust a bit too much information to make this feel more like an interactive lecture than a player-driven story.

There are other problems as well. The game’s graphics are… well, pretty bad. The character models for main characters are okay, but less important characters can look like something out of a PlayStation 2 launch title, the game is full of nasty pop-in and aliasing, and the framerates are atrocious. This is made even more stark when the game juxtaposes in the intro the game’s characters with actual video footage, making it clear how cartoonish even its best character models are compared to the people and events it’s imitating.

As for the gameplay, the game makes it clear when you make choices “this character will remember this”, much as in Telltale games, but as in those games, it’s often unclear just what sort of effect your choices are having. Oh, and walking speeds in this game are excruciatingly slow, and every now and then you’re given one of those “quicktime event” command prompts that one would hope we’d done away with years ago.

In short, 1979 Revolution is a bit of a mess, which is a shame because there was clearly a lot of attention paid to the details of historical accuracy, and the story the game tells within that history is compelling… if you have the patience to put up with the game to see it all.

tl;dr – 1979 Revolution: Black Friday is a Interactive Story-Driven Adventure where your choices for your character guide your path through the Iranian Revolution, painstakingly recreated according to historical documentation, and then marred by terrible graphics and shoddy gameplay. It’s a compelling story if you’re willing to put up with the game’s flaws.

Grade: C-

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