I have a lot of respect for games with deep stories that touch on important issues in our world. I respect you so much that I’m ready to forgive many nuances of execution, production and gameplay. And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen something like this, where a game combines serious, cruel and relevant themes with alpha-level performance. Accordingly, it hasn’t happened for a long time that I couldn’t immediately decide how to approach a particular game. Praise it, deservedly hate it, or judge it carefully… Fortunately, I am writing this review personally, which means I have freedom of decision within the framework of this material..
Main character 1979 Revolution: Black Friday — young photographer Reza Shirazi, who managed to return to his native Iran in 1978 – right at the height of violent popular unrest. Things have not yet reached a revolution, but the streets are restless – people are protesting against the local Shah, who is supported by the USA and Great Britain. On terms of mutually beneficial exchange, of course – power for oil. The ruler, disgusted by such a lucrative deal, mixed corruption and unemployment in the country and, parading around the palace in golden shorts, set the secret police on those especially dissatisfied. All of this, I remind you, is quite a real event.
So, real events show that Iran, the existence of which many do not know. It was a free country in the seventies. Men wore bell-bottoms, curled their mustaches, listened to disco and rock and roll. Women wore jeans, were not afraid to express their opinions, and generally played a much larger role than slaves on a domestic leash.
Doesn’t it cause dissonance?? Maybe someone even, hmm… I wonder how the country came to terrorism, burkas and the intranet. The Shah’s impudence knew no bounds and ultimately led to the game’s name Black Friday: On September 8, 1978, thousands of people took to the streets and hundreds of soldiers opened fire on them. After five bloody months, the revolutionaries achieved their goal, and the last Shah of the dynasty that ruled Iran for two and a half thousand years was overthrown. But in its place came a radical religious regime, which turned the country into an extremely explosive tent circus.
I’ll give it credit Black Friday — the game is extremely careful with its historical heritage. Developers from iNK Stories, many of whom saw the revolution with their own eyes, dug up some absolutely unimaginable amount of archival documents and photographs, interviewed dozens of eyewitnesses and participants in the revolution. In short, sometimes the development of the game was more like a journalistic investigation.
The result is a fictional story that fits gracefully into the chronicle of the revolution. Reza meets real historical figures, albeit unknown to us, but who played a significant role in the Iranian Revolution, albeit a negative one. Other characters, although completely fictitious, are in no way inferior to real people. Reza’s best friend is a pacifist Babak Azadi, defending the idea of a bloodless revolution – in general, almost the best thing in the game.
1979 Revolution savors two very cool, in fact, topics. Firstly, journalistic impartiality – Reza is just a photographer, not a soldier, not a revolutionary. His job is to document what is happening so that he can later show the pictures to the world. This is what he most likely would have done if the events of the game did not take place in the hero’s native Iran. Well, in Black Friday Reza’s decision remains on the player’s conscience.
The second theme is how good people, blinded by the best intentions, turn into monsters. This is a fairly common plot in art, which in the case of Black Friday is notable for one thing – here they turn into monsters not by the will of the author, but by their own decision. And it’s a very sad, scary story.
Another sad, scary story is the implementation Black Friday, which falls far short of the ambitious idea. Instead of a grandiose canvas about the revolution and the horrors of two regimes, we see the story of one guy, whose friends and relatives each pull to their side. It would seem that this is fertile ground for a branched, non-linear narrative, but the participants in the conflict, as a rule, simply do not have enough time to fully open up. It’s no joke – you can run through the game in an hour and a half and still study most of the pieces of paper, notes and historical facts (of which there are 86 in the game, by the way).
The gameplay here thoroughly follows the dogmas Telltale Games. That is, this is an interactive cartoon with answer options in dialogues and rare locations where you can freely walk around, talk with characters and collect objects. The only, albeit cool, feature of the game is the ability to photograph certain places and scenes. True, the feature is implemented very clumsily: you can only choose zoom, focusing is automatic, in the form of a mini-game. But when Reza clicks the shutter, the player is shown a real shot taken forty years ago in approximately the same circumstances.
Another Telltale hobby I’ve gotten into iNK Stories are meaningless elections with a ticking timer. There are practically no situations where the player’s decision seriously affects the story, and the most important choice generally comes in the penultimate chapter. I don’t argue that it was stupid to expect that in a game based on historical facts, the main character would be able to cancel the revolution, protect the old regime or drive religious fanatics out of Iran. But in 1979 Revolution there are a lot of local, personal plots – why not give the player control of them? Fortunately, at least you don’t have to type QTEs on the keyboard so often, of which there are much fewer here than in some other “The Walking Dead”.
But the graphics are not up https://gamblingdata.net/casinos/bwin-casino/ to par with the same telly series. The long-suffering Unity engine is trying its best to produce a nice picture, but blurry textures and crooked models are found here and there. By the way, there are no complaints about the animations – they are often surprisingly good, thanks to motion capture.
The only thing I have no complaints about is the way the game sounds. The soundtrack is cool and atmospheric, and all the actors, some of whom were direct witnesses to the events of 1979, give it their all.
It might already seem to you that I’m trashing the game to smithereens and I’m not going to recommend it to anyone, but… This is not so. Strictly speaking, I have few complaints about the 1979 Revolution. The complaints are more about what the game did not become. According to the original idea of the authors, Black Friday was a multi-part adventure game with a combat system, stealth sections and travel around Iran. An almanac game that shows the conflict from the perspective of several characters – so that players can see how women get used to wearing a burqa, and try to understand the train of thought of a Mujahid who hates Americans with all his heart.
Such a formula would present many stories, many places, many facts – in short, everything that you expect from a game based on such events. Revolution while telling the story of Reza, he shows only one plot. One sketch from the documentary. A few destinies out of thousands that were affected by the revolution. The authors’ too grandiose ambitions are partly to blame for this result. Partly – something else.
Remember how I mentioned at the very beginning of the review that people are sometimes unusual in seeing a free Iran? iNK Stories we found out through our own bitter experience that for many this is not only unusual, but uninteresting. Generations that grew up watching semi-propaganda war films are not interested in any work that shows Iranians other than as terrorists inspired by the Koran.
Black Friday four years in development. Two of them went to find funding – potential publishers just shook their heads in disbelief and wondered what the studio was counting on with such an idea. The Kickstarter campaign, although not completely a failure, did not achieve its goal. All this forced iNK Stories moderate your ardor slightly and try to quickly release what was already ready.
Of course, Iran, native to most developers, did not stand aside either. Director Black Friday (and former screenwriter Rockstar Games) Navida Khonsari dubbed in the local press as a spy spreading propaganda. One of the game’s artists had to leave Iran after it became known that local police were keeping an eye on employees iNK Stories, and several developers worked under pseudonyms, afraid to give their real names. Almost all studio workers have been banned from entering the country. Oh yes, the game itself was also banned in Iran
Developers often characterized the genre in various interviews Black Friday like game verite – by analogy with cinema verite, genre of French documentary film. But if the original vision of the game by the authors met the standards of documentary filmmaking, then the final result does not reach this title.
1979 Revolution feels unfinished. Even taking into account financial difficulties and persecution at home, the game looks like a beta, desperately polished and released – in other words, according to the recipe of many modern blockbusters. The authors’ amazing, without exaggeration, idea turned out to be worthy of praise, but nothing more.
However, the game received flattering reviews from critics and even several awards, and it sold reasonably well. If the developers don’t lose their passion – or if suddenly there is a desperate publisher who is not afraid of the explosive success of the game – then it is likely that we will see the second part 1979 Revolution, whom you no longer want to scold. Or maybe it won’t even be worth it.
Oh, right, I forgot about the screenshot from the radio at the beginning of the review. So here you go Black Friday completely unique Russian translation. After all, only in the Russian version of the game can you install Turkish or Spanish anti-aliasing, and in the “summary” settings you can teach the main character to dodge. But this is all a joke, of course. In fact, sometimes there are strange phrases and expressions in the translation, and the lousy font does not fit into half the dialogue frames.
P.S. As always, thanks to Daria Kot_Behemoth for her help with editing the video version!
Best comments
Thank you for the interesting story about a little-known game, I really liked the division of the review into chapters with choices. The game itself, however, didn’t interest me, but not because I’m bored of seeing a free Iran, but because I’m generally not interested in the culture and history of the countries of the Middle East.
Publish more often in Blogs so that they don’t die :3
Of course, the video is clearer (especially the jokes at the beginning), but the test version is, of course, great too (thumbs up emoticon).
Well, how, how… All through the same non-linear dialogues and personal stories. I have a faint hope that iNK Stories will release a few more episodes. Each is about one character and with unique mechanics (like Reza’s photography).
Grand Mercy for your review! I have already tried to publish on blogs “more often”, which resulted in the second review in three months.
I will correct the situation.
Considering what format the authors chose, it would have been a mess. What is needed here is not conventional dialogue branching, but real nonlinearity. Well, probably the genre is still different, closer to RPG.
Well, that would be interesting. Directly according to the plot of the same Persepolis – a young heroine who finds herself in pre-revolutionary Iran is forced to constantly be torn between following new principles and resisting them. Moreover, the more she rebels, the worse the ending would be.
potential publishers just shook their heads in disbelief and wondered what the studio was counting on with such an idea
“A game about historical events, but without assassins and Templars. No, no! Some kind of nonsense.")
Thanks for the material. It was interesting. Although the theme of the Iranian Revolution is not very catchy, it would be interesting to find out “how women get used to wearing a burqa, and to understand the train of thought of a Mujahid who hates Americans with all his heart” (although I have no idea how to correctly implement this in the game).
And you’re welcome. Yes, try to play – the game has already been released, it seems, on everything. Including Androids and Nintendo Switch.