Road to Empress deftly uses the movie-game format to place you in Tang China and kill you, over and over again
If you’re of a certain age, games using live-action movie footage snap your brain to the “full motion video” fad of the 90s and the middling games that resulted from it. (Or Dragon's Lair, if you're a Gen-Xer.) I had a Sega CD as a kid; I lived through these games and I was considered lucky to be able to play them. What I really had was an advance view on a disappointment that the other kids wouldn’t know about until the Playstation.
In their attempts to graft fast-paced arcade action onto low-budget genre movies, these games were less fun than regular video games, and turned "watching a movie" into an exercise in memorization. Once video cutscenes stopped being a novelty and started to become a norm, this genre naturally withered.
But it wasn’t the idea of using live-action footage that was misguided; it was the invariably awkward and unresponsive “gameplay”. If you want to make a more strictly narrative-oriented game, the movie-game becomes a better choice: see noted Shiren fan Sam Barlow’s games (Her Story, Immortality). Square-Enix has even gotten into it lately.
But I haven’t played any of those yet. I have played Road to Empress, because it grabs you. The game is aggressive. I watched a streamer play the game’s first two minutes, and from that scene alone, I was so certain that I was going to have a good time that I bought it on the spot.
The genre is palace intrigue in ancient China, the Tang dynasty. (Fans of The Apothecary Diaries will feel at home.) As a nobody from an middling noble family, you enter the lowest tier of candidate for royal consort. The palace is a snake pit, nothing is fair, and your life is perpetually on the line, even in the smallest social interactions. That a cruel and brutal death lies on the wrong side of every choice is one of this game’s selling points, and these frequent deaths are how it keeps its branching narrative tree neatly trimmed.
