Long Live The Queen is a quirky sort of game lying somewhere in-between a simulation, a visual novel, and a choose your own adventure game. You are Elodie, the 14-year old heir to the throne. Your mother, the queen, has died, and you must prepare yourself to take the throne in 40 weeks – if you can survive that long. The game takes its name from the fact that this is no easy task; deathLong Live The Queen is a quirky sort of game lying somewhere in-between a simulation, a visual novel, and a choose your own adventure game. You are Elodie, the 14-year old heir to the throne. Your mother, the queen, has died, and you must prepare yourself to take the throne in 40 weeks – if you can survive that long. The game takes its name from the fact that this is no easy task; death can lurk anywhere. Or so the trailers promise, at any rate.
The trailers seemed to indicate that this game was primarily humorous in nature; you create Elodie after Elodie, training her differently each time, only for her to meet some unfortunate end along the way. While the unfortunate end bit may or may not be accurate, the humor is not; while there are a few humorous moments in the game, one the whole the story is actually quite serious, and follows Elodie as she tries to navigate the complexities of court life while being woefully underprepared for it. Frequently, Elodie is faced with some sort of situation that she has to deal with, and via a combination of her skills – which she trains herself in two of every week, at your direction – and your own decisions, you must navigate your way through the game blindly, never knowing what the consequences of your decisions are going to be in the end. Everything from deciding whether or not to attend a birthday party to choosing to assassinate a scheming noble is covered by the game, and which skills you have seem to affect the choices you can make. As you go through the game, your choices have consequences which come back on you, forcing you to deal with or benefit from your past decisions.
The story is overall passable, but nothing special, and while there is minor variability from game to game, it is relatively minor.
The flow of the game is very simple – every week, you choose classes for Elodie, then some scripted event happens that you have to respond to (or which gives you a hint to upcoming events), then finally you get to make some additional choice of what to do around the castle on the weekend for the purpose of effecting Elodie’s mood. There are a total of 40 weeks in the game, and your goal is to survive through to the end.
It may seem bizarre to say that a game which gives you a large number of choices would grant you very little agency, but this game grants practically no real agency in many situations. The problem, to put it simply, is that you have absolutely no idea whatsoever what your choices mean, and you have no idea which skills are going to come up, or when they will be important. I never once used a large number of skills, while other skills were used very frequently – and while some of those skills which were used very frequently made logical sense, such as courtly manners, presence, divination, and wield magic, others were outright bizarre, with decoration being used a considerable number of times, while I never once used the dance skill or horseback riding.
This is partially due to the choices you make – I did deliberately avoid making skill checks in some situations – but it is also due to choice blindness. While the usefulness of some skills is obvious, the usefulness of other skills is much more obscure – is knowing about horses going to be relevant? It seems like something which would be relevant, and yet, it never once came up, and only once did I ever see anything where it might have been relevant (a choice at the tournament). I only saw one instance where dancing would have mattered as well. When I went out to sea on a ship, I never made a naval strategy check or a swimming check, but I did make a climbing check of all things. Even when you’re warned of upcoming events, frequently you don’t have enough time to crank up your skill checks enough to make a difference – in many cases, a single week of preparation is all that you are given at best, while at others, you are given no forewarning at all of upcoming events, even though logically you should have been warned.
While making choices is important, if you have no way of reasonably evaluating which choices you are going to be called on to make, or the consequences of your choices, or even how high your skills need to be to succeed, your choices aren’t really meaningful – you are simply making them at random, or near-random. Even choices which had to do with how much money you have in the treasury frequently did not tell you how much money you had, nor how much you were spending. Some choices were interesting because they were nerve wracking and the pros and cons could be easily seen, but in terms of raising skills, it was hard to tell whether raising divination was a better idea than raising courtly manners, or how the two would differ.
On the whole, Long Live the Queen’s feeling of lack of agency and lack of explanation outweigh any virtues it might have; the story and graphics aren’t good enough to save it. It is an interesting idea, but the execution was lacking.… Expand
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