Started a few new short ones.
We, the Revolution is fascinating. Short pitch: Papers, Please meets Ace Attorney in Revolutionary France. It's basically a visual novel, more than anything else, by Klabater (publisher, not developer). This little publisher that does lots of history edutainment on the most random-ass subjects with a surprising but not stellar amount of polish. Everything they make is really original and just a little awkward. They did Amazing American Circus. I've developed quite an interest in them.
This one casts you as a judge of the French Revolutionary Tribunal. Your job, at first, seems to be to play Ace Attorney from the judge's perspective. In reality, it's a complex clusterfuck of minigames that has you waging political warfare and intrigues to battle for your life in the snake den that is Revolutionary Paris, with lots of real-life people and events making appearances. The core goal of the game is (in empathy game fashion) to beat you down and get you to accept the cold logic of letting killers walk free and sending innocent men to the guillotine because if you don't do whatever King Mob wants you to do they'll lynch you.
The cases themselves are a little lacking. You basically read over a summary, match each "clue" (you might call them) to what its relevance to the case is (motive, evidence, etc.), and then you ask the defendant as many questions as you want before passing judgment. All of the importance of it relates to how the public reacts. You're not there to find out truth, and the dialogue makes it clear that the court is just grandstanding. No, every political faction (as well as your family) will have a preferred sentence and they get fucking pissed if you don't hand it down. The jury will give an opinion, and they get fucking pissed if you override them. And if you ask too many questions, King Mob gets fucking pissed and riots. Your reputation (kind of a bonus to all factions) depends on filling out your report correctly, which sometimes requires asking enough questions. You control the juries opinion by selectively choosing which questions to ask, so there's basically one trade-off of:
1) The more questions I ask, the more information I get, but the closer I get to angering the crowd; also, I want to question in such an order/cut questioning at the right time to get the jury verdict I want.
2) I want a jury verdict that balances my political needs at present
Piss off a faction too much and they kill you/sack you. So far I've seen Revolutionaries (the leadership, bourgeoisie, kind of moderate except on social/political issues), the Common Folk (wildly inconsistent, depending on how much they're stirred up, goddamn animals), and the Aristocrats.
Your family enters in in that you've got to balance spending time with them (you choose how to allocate leisure time between many possible tasks) to keep up good relations because each effects a different standing (earthy populist dad, rebel son, dutiful public wife who effects general reputation, little son who effects your standing with the whole family), and often these real-life characters like Danton popping in on you.
What surprised me is that it just keeps throwing in more and more mechanics. Minigames where you have to persuade a politician (match the right rhetorical appeal to the right argument to their personality). Execute a man and you can try to grandstand with a speech (same mechanics) to curry more public favor, but it can backfire and embarrass you. Quell riots in combat. Long, drawn-out intrigues where you make decisions about how to outfox someone that wants to guillotine you. There's kind of alternate history elements to it, I don't know how far off from reality you can go but it did list acquitting King Louis XVI as an option... but extremely hard. I think it's building up to something where who survives the Revolutionary purges can change.
The thing isn't great. It's bad at conveying all of this crap. It doesn't have full voice acting, so much of it is practically in silence. But it's stylish, it feels like a real labor of love, it's original, it's fascinating.
