All I know about the French Revolution so far comes from two literary works: Hilary Mantel’s excellent book A Place Of Greater Safety and Kate Beaton’s webcomics. Neither Mantel nor Beaton mention mechs, which are a key feature of Imugi Studio’s new “ideology-driven” turn-based strategy game Bonaparte: A Mechanized Revolution. I, for one, feel like I’ve been grossly misinformed. Kate, Hilary, I’ve been quoting you at parties for years, and it seems that all the while people have been silently judging me for my ignorance of the role giant mechanical soldiers played in the fall of the Bastille.
Imugi Studio is comprised of veterans of the prolific Canadian indie publisher Kitfox Games and the developers of Sea Of Stars Sabotage. This is their first game, and it looks very much like a Kitfox production – a narrative-driven alternative history sandbox. Here's the trailer…
Watch on YouTube
…and here's some background information from the press release. The game begins in 1789, and you play as either Celine or Cesar Bonaparte, two seemingly fictional variations of the famously megalomaniacal Napoleon. The game retains some grounding in historical records, but lets you choose your own path through the events of the Revolution. There doesn't have to be a Revolution, for starters. Guillotines are so LEFTafter all. You could choose to defend Marie Antoinette and her ilk against the mob, sending your troops to force-feed the peasants their rhetorical cake. Or you could side with the moderates and try to reform the system in some way. Hey, it worked so well for us Brits!
Apparently, players will be able to “see politics unfold in real time on the battlefield,” but the trailer doesn’t really elaborate on what that means. It looks like a game of two parts: hexagonal, turn-based battles with the aforementioned mechanical colossi, and tense dialogues with luminaries of the era like Robespierre. There’s also a paper world map with army figures that looks a lot like Paradox Interactive.
It's coming out in early 2025 and has a Steam page. The presentation gives me a vague impression of Overlord, which is promising, but I'm a little worried about the mechs, which feel like an afterthought, sneaking around behind the title's colon. Or worse, a marketing gimmick. This doesn't feel like a steampunk world in other ways. Maybe Mantel and Beaton were right after all.