The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante

The game plays as a Choose Your Own Adventure where you take the life of a lowly noble and navigate life from birth to death. You start off as ab aby which is essentially just character development and then build up your story and ways forward later in the game. The game lore is very well written and the atmosphere is great. I heartily recommend it if you like CYOA games. Only niggles for me were a few inconsistencies, some spelling/grammatical errors. I would be fine with the spelling errors - they happen, but I think they need to nail consistency to keep the immersion in a game like this. That's the only reason I knocked off one star.

The strength of this game is the lore that is very interesting to discover. The drawing is beautiful (but the chara design does not meet my tastes, the kids look like very old people). If you like this kind of game, you might want to try "The Lost Heir" trilogy and "The Great Tournament" duology.

The game, while mechanically sound and strangely engaging, is one of the most uninspired pieces of literature I have read in a while. The game presents you with moral "conundrums" which almost *obviously* will have an intended "right" answer. For example, part of the lore is that the game's world is split into three Lots: the commoners who are, I kid you not, supposed to "suffer" (their words); the priests who are supposed to guide the commoners (and maybe the nobles? I don't really remember), and the nobles who are supposed to lead and be cool. So the game constantly insists the commoners should "suffer" and literally incorporates whipping them as part of the in-game religion. Then it asks you whether you would stick with the "old faith" or "new faith"....golly me, I have no idea what most people would choose. In fairness, there are like 4 different ways of rejecting the old faith so at least there's some variety there. As someone who has tried to write CHYOA stories before, I do respect the branching paths the game introduces. A large struggle with a CHYOA game is that every new branch is essentially a whole new story you need to write. That being said, the game has a toggle (which they recommend to turn on) that tells you what the stat impact of each action is. In my opinion this should be a red flag against the game's writing and it breaks immersion often, leading to a stat-optimization playstyle instead of one where I would choose what's in character/what I actually think. As a final critique, and this is a SPOILER (of a romance subplot), so skip ahead to avoid it, is, briefly: Why the hell did Jeanne fall in love with me and why did I fall in love back, I basically opposed her at every turn, I mean c'mon. In conclusion: this might be a good way to get into interactive fiction as it's fairly polished with decent drawings, music, and is essentially a VN with a lot more text. Afterward you can look into better games on IFDB.

Happy that I have bought this game. Hapy as well, that there is a lot story lines and choices. Pissed, that gameplay is quite often "load and rework". You havent meet requirement? Youre done mate, you have no impact on this. This is a game when you want to male a big chart which decision leads where - seems nice, but I have found this frustrating very often.