In the first few chapters I was amazed by The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante. The story branching was fantastic in that I could tell from a logical standpoint why certain choices were not available to me based on my actions and it did a great job of making me make tough choices. Like in real life sometimes the options available to you are not always the ones you want but you can try to do the best with what you have. Chapter iv saw me take a dislike to the game though as I feel railroaded. No matter what I have tried to choose, and I have gone back and done different tries at it, I end up by the 27th year with a true death and no way around it. This highlights the game’s poor save system in my eyes. You get one save slot and the game auto saves. It doesn’t tell you when it saves and if you want to restart from earlier you have to redo entire chapters. At this point I would have to pretty much start a whole new game and make drastically different choices to get into a different type of life. My problem with that is that if going into certain types of life you get result in getting stuck in chapter IV and not being able to get to chapter V then why even have them ? Proper story branching, in my eyes, should mean we all get to the end but our journey there is different and our outcome can vary. In this case though I can’t even get to the end. Aside from my distaste for chapter iv I will say that the game does it’s personality system very well. There are a great variation of traits and they can effect a variety of outcomes. The characters were for the most part interesting. I did feel that some of the side stories got a bit boring. I wasn’t much interested in the dealings with the church and I felt that too many side characters got introduced in chapter iv that didn’t see much use. It just made the story feel bloated. The presentation of the game was good. I liked how the game was basically a book with each scene a turn of the page. The voice acting for Brante was a bit stiff and could have been better. The music was decent but repetitive as were the sound effects. One last thing I want to touch on is that the game has no skip option for text. For a game with no manual saves and that makes me repeat entire chapters to change anything this is unacceptable.
I played Sir Brante on Linux using Wine. The game never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. On earlier versions it had crashed after chapter two each time but luckily that seems to have been fixed either by Wine updates or game updates. There are not many graphics options, just resolution and v-sync. I notice v-sync doesn’t always work though as sometimes it respects my 165 Hz refresh and other times caps me at 60 Hz. The problem with 60 Hz is that it will dip down to lower FPS at times and feel a tad sluggish at points where when it respects my 165 Hz this never happens.
Game Engine: Unity
Graphics API: WineD3D
Disk Space Used: 3GB
Game Version Played: 1.04.6
Game Settings Used: 2560*1440, v-sync on
GPU Usage: 0-67 %
VRAM Usage: 1256-2392
CPU Usage: 6-14%
RAM Usage: 3.2-4.7 GB
I wanted to like Sir Brante but chapter iv sucked any enjoyment I had for it. Sure I could restart the game and choose different lots and live a different life but if I have to live a specific life in order to get to chapter v then why have choices at all ? Make a kinetic novel if you want to tell a specific story. The idea was good but combine the poor voice acting with the terrible save system and the lack of text skipping and I can’t recommend it.
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 23.0.1 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.2.8-zen1-1-zen | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165hz | Wine 8.4