A Revolution has come to Iran, and you get to decide what role you will play in it, kind of. 1979 Revolution: Black Friday is an interactive adventure game in the vein of the Telltale Games formula. You will essentially sit back as a movie unfolds, and make conversational decisions and act upon different choices to influence the outcome of the story. The game sprinkles in some quick time events here and there, but it is mostly deciding to choose what your character will say in any given situation. The catch here is that instead of focusing on a fictional narrative, we are instead thrown into the political intrigue of the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran.
We start off with Reza, a student that has recently returned home from Germany to pursue his photography career, being captured in a rebel headquarters. We are thrown into an intense interrogation scene where we need to listen to and respond to our jailer. This interrogator, among other characters in the game, are based upon real people from this era of history, and several events are tied to accounts from different people that lived through the era. While it is not my place to call into veracity the accuracy of all of the claims from the game, it is fascinating to see what it could have been like for people in the country at the time. Some sections, for example, require you to replicate real pictures taken during protests and events of the revolution. This focus on a photographer means that you will often be given the choice between violence, and non-violence. As the interrogation goes on, you will flash back to previous conversations and events to relive them, and this makes up the bulk of the game. It’s not an original narrative style, but it is a well executed one, and lends itself to the player having a bit of agency that can be justified and explained to coincide with the overarching story.
1979 Revolution: Black Friday is a very by the numbers game. It is basically an exact clone of the Telltale Games formula, and so if you’ve played those games, you’re not going to find anything new here. Revolution doesn’t look as impressive, and the Nintendo Switch version of the game suffers from frequent slowdown and frame skips when navigating through large crowds. 1979 Revolution carries itself with its story, characters, and the intimate webs we weave with them as we advance the narrative. While there are the photography segments mentioned above, they tend to get tedious quickly. It is a novel idea, but that novelty doesn’t make up for the fact that you will too often find yourself moving your reticule around the screen looking for the green dot that indicates a significant shot. This is further complicated by the focus going crazy for the majority of the time you’re looking through your viewfinder, and you only have a small window in which to press the shutter button. The one redeeming feature of this beyond being shown an actual version of the original photograph, but this is Revolution’s manner of providing you context within the game.
If you would like to learn about the Iranian revolution in an interesting way, and you enjoy interactive stories, then 1979 Revolution: Black Friday comes highly recommended. Even if you’re not specifically interested in the one side of the story presented herein, most will still find an interesting story and can make some decisions to influence it a bit.
