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Everything I know about the French Revolution has hitherto come from two literary works: Hilary Mantel’s excellent doorstopper A Place Of Greater Safety, and Kate Beaton’s webcomics. Neither Mantel nor Beaton mention mechs, which are a core feature of Studio Imugi’s new “ideology driven” turn-based strategy game Bonaparte: A Mechanized Revolution. I, for one, feel like I’ve been grossly ill-informed. Kate, Hilary – I’ve been quoting you for years at parties and it seems like all this time, people have been silently judging me for my ignorance of the role giant clockwork soldiers played in the fall of the Bastille.
Studio Imugi are made up of veterans of prolific Canadian indie publisher Kitfox Games and Sea Of Stars devs Sabotage. This is their debut game, and it very much looks like a Kitfox production – a nerdy, narrative-led alt-historical sandbox. Here’s the announcement trailer…
…and here’s some background from the press release. The game begins in 1789, and casts you as either Céline or César Bonaparte – two seemingly fictional variations upon noted megalomaniac Napoleon. The game keeps some foothold in historical record, but lets you pick your own path through the events of the Revolution. There doesn’t have to be a Revolution, for starters. Guillotines are so gauche, after all. You might choose to defend Marie Antoinette and her ilk against the mob, sending your troops to force-feed the peasants rhetorical cake. Or you could side with the moderates and try to reform the system somehow. Hey, it worked out so well for us British!
Apparently, players will be able to “see policy play out in real time on the battlefield”, but it’s not really clear what that amounts to from the trailer. It looks like a game of two halves: hex and turn-based battles featuring the aforesaid mechanical Colossi, and tense branching dialogue with period luminaries such as Robespierre. There’s also a papery world map with army figurines which looks very Paradox Interactive.
It’s out in early 2025, and has a Steam page. I get a faint whiff of Suzerain from the presentation, which is promising, but I’m a little concerned about the mechs, who do feel like an afterthought, skulking furtively behind the colon in the title. Or worse, a publicity gimmick. This doesn’t seem to be a steampunk world in other respects. Perhaps Mantel and Beaton were in the right of things, after all.