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Wednesday 7 November, 2018
I finished 1979 Revolution: Black Friday tonight and was massively disappointed with how the game wrapped everything up, or rather how it didn’t. The game ends so abruptly that I actually thought I had triggered a false ending and looked it up online to make sure I hadn’t messed up somehow. But no, it ends with almost none of the plot threads explained or resolved in any form. You don’t get to find out what happens after Black Friday and the Shah steps down, who came into power, how your decisions affected that. The player might not even now that the revolution successfully caused the Shah to step down if they didn’t read one of the stories that says so. You don’t find out what the secret plans were or what Bibi was up to, the mole is never revealed, etc. The only plot thread that really ends is your relationship with your brother, where he is either killed or reveals he has betrayed you based on your actions toward him throughout the game. Furthermore, this seems to be the only instance where your choices actually seem to matter and have any kind of impact on the story. Even the summary of your choices at the end of the game feels inconsequential, with most just boiling down to if you decided to be a peaceful protestor or not, which while important, doesn’t seem like it should be the extent of your decision making here. Everything else seems to be there to simply simulate internal conflict where there is none because the outcome is always the same.
This game really failed to live up to its promising premise. Everything from the seemingly unfinished and at times poorly written story to the plethora of technical issues cumulated in a game that really isn’t worth playing. Which is a shame, because teaching people about this and other historical events in such an entertaining fashion that is really able to put the player in the situations of its characters is a great idea, the execution here was just really lacking. It feels like the developers bit off way more than they could chew here and you’re frankly better off reading books or articles about the event and playing a Telltale game for your choice-based story-driven gameplay. Furthermore, I had some real issues with the game’s portrayal of events during the climax.
The ending of the game takes place, as the subtitle implies, during Black Friday, where martial law is called and the military opens fire on the protesting public, killing between 84-88 people and injuring 205 in the actual event. Which feels like something the game should’ve covered, but I’ve had to look it up instead. Anyways, this entire end sequence feels highly problematic. Whereas it feels like the emphasis of this scene should’ve been focused solely on the devasting and tragic nature of the event, you instead get to play the hero and run around the gunfire trying to save a character that has been shot, and later deciding which character to try and save. Instead of mourning the deaths of the dozens you have just witnessed, the game takes the easy way out and has Babak, the character who has been following you through most of the game, die suddenly. The problem here is that it does not feel earned. Babak’s death feels like little more than a cheap shot to try and get some emotion from the player when you should already have plenty there given the very real tragic circumstances of which your game is currently taking place. It all feels very sterile and Hollywood, and it seems like Babak’s sole purpose was to die at the end for some attempt at emotional payoff as his only other function was to explain the pacifist route to the player.
By focusing on the fictional characters to deliver the emotional weight, it feels like it disregards and gives less credit to the suffering of those that were actually there. If you want to tell historical fiction, do that. If you want to attempt a documentary game and load it with facts and follow a survivor’s story, do that. The event is recent enough that you could talk to some survivors and find an interesting story to tell. The middle ground just winds up not feeling justified here. While I have no doubt that the developers had the best intentions with this game, the entire game is dedicated to them in the credits and the creator was a child in Iran during the revolution, the whole thing plays in all the wrong ways. If you’re going to have a game about a very real tragedy, focus on the tragedy itself and the real people that were affected by it, not the made-up characters we barely learned anything about in the game’s brief two-hour playthrough. It feels like the game felt it had taken care of everything it needed to by throwing in facts and making it half education game and then forgot to have its story be about said event and its consequences and the people involved. Instead we learn about the event through some fictional characters in a half baked and underdeveloped narrative full of tropes and hardly have any time to consider the ramifications for the people actually involved during the game’s action-packed climax.
If you want to incorporate choice in meaningful ways to better simulate the experience of a revolutionary, then sure, you’ll need to have a fictional narrative to accompany said choices. 1979 Revolution: Black Friday doesn’t have the meaningful choices to justify its fictional approach, however. While the middle section of the game gets close to simulating the frustration and impossible situations you might have to deal with in such an event, it all falls apart very quickly once you realize how your choices are clearly having little to no actual impact within the game and makes all the previous and future choices feel hollow as a result. While most game’s with decision making are mostly linear, they do a far better job masking said fact by having certain things that are easily interchangeable change permanently and by having far more branches and choices within the game. It feels like at the very least the game needed more time to develop its story and strengthen the impact of your choices, and at least acknowledge said choices’ impact once the game ends.
Overall, I couldn’t help but be disappointed with 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. While the game showed a lot of promise, it ultimately collapsed under the weight of its litany of technical, presentation, and narrative issues. The game clearly needed more time before release. It seems like all versions of the game were ported from the mobile version as well, which certainly didn’t help matters. The game just really needed to tackle something a bit more manageable or spend the extra time and money to get the game in a presentable state so that it could’ve lived up to its potential.
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