I seldom feel like completing a game’s story twice, even when a single run only lasts 3-4 hours and I know I’ve left mountains of stones unturned, but Amarantus amply justifies starting afresh. It’s not just that a second playthrough gives you the chance to know characters in different ways – seducing him rather than her, or perhaps both at once; alienating an old friend while forming an unnervingly close bond with somebody who, last time round, threatened to kill you if you let your ideals get the better of your empathy. Nor is starting again just about uncovering what’s really going on with the wider plot, with multiple playthroughs introducing people and backstories that exist initially as shadows, dancing between the lines of the prose and in the delicacies of character performances.
Amarantus reviewDeveloper: ub4qPublisher: ub4qPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 27 June on Steam.
Amarantus is a tale of political revolution, but revolution can also mean repetition, and repetition is crucial here, not just in terms of learning and “mastering” this glorious visual novel’s small, rewarding assortment of choices so as to reach the Best Ending, but also in the growing resonance of recurring scenes that explore “recurrence” as a theme. Starting again isn’t simply about learning what you missed, and making less-terrible decisions. It’s about learning what it means to start again, though it’s hard to say more without spoiling things.
That’s my grandiose armchair-Walter Benjamin reading of Amarantus, anyway. You can also play it purely for the joy of hanging around some brilliant, damaged-but-not-broken people, having ill-advised sex, getting into ill-advised fights, and doing various other silly things that always make for a gripping adventure. There’s every kind of emotion at work in this game: desire, joy and bitterness, explosive anger or sadness and scenes of throwaway kindness or sparkling wit or believable mundanity.
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The game follows a small band of unusual suspects who are trying to overthrow a tyrant, Lord Caudat, against the backdrop of a forever war with a country overseas. You play Arik Tereison, whose dissident parents are arrested by Caudat’s goons during the prologue, and who promptly sets off to the capital city for retribution. Much of the story is about deciding what kind of revolutionary you want Arik to be – a public usurper, a voice of reason striving for a bloodless transfer of power, a knife in the shadows – while reckoning with the reality that he is no kind of revolutionary at all. He’s a brash 20-something with no plan beyond getting some payback, and minimal experience of political organising, let alone things like sword-fighting or palace infiltration. His role is less to become the hero of the resistance, though that’s an option if you make certain decisions, than to serve as a source of narrative momentum.