1979 Revolution: Black Friday

How it started: play this game. How it's going: check the news.

This is a very qualified thumbs up. There's a lot about 1979 Revolution: Black Friday that is frustrating, in particular its ending (where they planning, or hoping, to continue this story?). The choices are Telltale-style, but they mostly fall flat, changing little about the story and (more importantly) how you feel about the story and characters. And the failable quicktime events should have been left out: they're not thrilling or fun. But when 1979 Revolution tells its story about a time and a place in history that is rarely touched on in Western culture, it is fascinating, and it does a good job of introducing players who might not know much about the Iranian Revolution to the topic without feeling too overtly didactic. I wish they'd had the chance to continue 1979 Revolution, learn from the first game and deliver a more polished, and story-wise more satisfying, follow-up.

I went into this game with a bias. As someone who leans liberal, I’ve tended to see the Pahlavi monarchy’s secular modernization as a flawed but perhaps necessary stage on the path toward eventual democratization. So I started this game assuming that 'gradual reform and preserving the monarchy' might have been the more responsible path. However, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday genuinely challenged that assumption. Seeing the social fractures beneath the White Revolution, the repression carried out by SAVAK, and especially the moment when troops open fire on civilians, forced me to confront the reality that development imposed from above can still rest on coercion. At the same time, the revolutionary movement isn’t romanticized either. The game makes it clear that liberation movements are not morally monolithic, and that the hope for justice can evolve into a new form of authority. What impressed me most is that the game refuses easy equivalences or simple moral math. It doesn’t argue that one regime was “the same” as the other. Instead, it highlights something more uncomfortable: whenever POWER consolidates—whether in the name of modernization or religion—individual FREEDOM becomes f…

Great acting, directing, music, and dialogue writing don't make up for a brief (2 hours or so) Telltale-like choose your own adventure story. The story itself is very confused as to what it wants to be and feels incomplete as it will abruptly end.

"There's no shame in being invested in your people's future" Clearly inspired by Telltale-style games, it feels familiar but the gameplay itself can be clunky, with stiff controls and weird QTEs. Where the game fully shines is in its storytelling, by tackling a subject rarely explored in the West, the game reaches its full potential when it explores these events and their consequences, offering a glimpse into another era that is now more relevant than ever.

It's a bit short and bare boned, but in a couple of quick hours it gives a very vivid look into the tensions and complexities and fallout of the 1979 revolution. Lots of codex entries, too.