I have a growing appreciation for games and media that are able to bring significant, historical events to my attention and creating a satisfactory experience from them. I don’t necessarily mean events like World War 2, The Cold War or interpretations of contemporary military conflicts; stuff like that has been and will continue to be done to death. No, I’m talking about major historicalI have a growing appreciation for games and media that are able to bring significant, historical events to my attention and creating a satisfactory experience from them. I don’t necessarily mean events like World War 2, The Cold War or interpretations of contemporary military conflicts; stuff like that has been and will continue to be done to death. No, I’m talking about major historical events that I would likely have never heard of had I not played the game itself. Well, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and the developers at iNK Stories have done pretty much that, doing an admirable job at providing a crash course in the Iranian Revolution in video game form.
You play as Reza Shirazi, a photojournalist who has returned home to Iran in the midst of the revolution after living abroad in Germany. Reza is developing photos from his latest outing when his hideout is raided by the police and is subsequently imprisoned at Evin Prison, notorious for the amount of political prisoners it housed both during and after the Islamic Revolution. He is then interrogated by a man named Hajj Agha as to what he knows about the Iranian Revolution in an attempt to overthrow the Shah.
The core gameplay loop is very similar to what you would experience in a Telltale game. That is, interacting with various objects/events in your environment and make dialogue choices that can affect how the story plays out. There are two achievements tied to making all peaceful or all violent choices within the game, so whatever side you pick, keep your decisions making consistent. There are a couple of scenes where some of the decisions you make play out in front of you, so it was nice to know that at least some of my choices mattered in this game. There are also QTEs that you’ll need to pass and various points in the game and mostly amount to pushing the left thumb stick in a certain direction or mashing the “A” button.
The voice acting is well done, but is kind of let down by janky and stiff animations. While it does an alright job of giving a sort of generalist take on the events of the Iranian Revolution, I felt that the overall story was needlessly brief and lacked a fair amount of meaningful character development for its cast of characters. This also meant that the voice acting in certain scenes didn’t hit me as hard as they could have. While I reacted to them on a basic human emotional level, it was missing that next step that you usually get when you’re truly invested in the characters of a game.
Visually, the game looks kind of rough and unpolished. The lights, shadows and textures make a lot of the environments feel kind of dull and flat. There are a few instances where objects have been both poorly modelled and obviously textured, like the food you see at Reza’s family’s home during dinner time. A lot of background NPCs have very clearly been copied and pasted in terms of looks and animations. The overall graphically fidelity on things like character models and environments all look very dated and the art direction isn’t enough to save it.
Overall, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday has a fantastic premise that I would love to see games explore more, especially in regards to other major historical events that may not be as mainstream. I respect what iNK Stories have done here, trying to bring the events of the Iranian Revolution to the attention of people, like me, who might’ve otherwise overlooked this. The game has some good voice acting and some standout moments that make the game feel genuine and believable. But the story just feels like it needed more content; the story had me hooked for the most part, it just left me wanting a bit more. With some chapters being insanely short, that could’ve been an opportunity to build up more of the story, but it never happened. I also didn’t really connect with any of the characters as much as a I wanted to and the short runtime and underdeveloped story likely played a part in that. I think I can still recommend the 1979 Revolution: Black Friday at a discount if you’re idly curious about the game like I was, in search of a quick completion (my playtime last just over 3 and half hours) or if you’re a bit of a history buff.… Expand
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