Having recently gained an interest in playing more choice-based narrative games, I eventually settled on playing The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante for today’s review. It’s a visual novel RPG released for PC in 2021 (other versions came later), developed by Sever and published by 101XP. Its premise involves the player acting out the life of a man in a grim fantasy world, and guiding him through decisions that will subtly shape the destiny of the empire in which he lives. Players interact with the game entirely through reading text and making choices. Please note the Steam version of the game was used.

The game’s story takes place in the Blessed Arkanian Empire and follows the story of the third child of the Brante family. His first name is decided by the player and the title of “Sir” is earned based on how the story plays out, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll just call him Sir Brante. The world of The Life and Suffering is a harsh place, with society divided into three castes called Lots with the Nobles who govern and indulge, the Priests who teach and interpret, and the Commoners who work and suffer. The patriarch of the Brante family is Noble but by Mantle alone, and his second wife being a Commoner makes Sir Brante a Commoner as a consequence. Imperial reforms have introduced means of changing one’s Lot in recent history though, so your future is anything but set in stone. From this backdrop it’s up to you as Sir Brante to learn the ways of the world, build strength of character, manage your connections and relations, and ultimately carve out your place in society amidst an era of great social upheaval. Between managing the fate of your family, the good of the county of Anziotte, your career, and other complications, you definitely have a lot on your shoulders.

The narrative of The Life and Suffering takes a bit of time to adjust to as the world it portrays is at times overwhelmingly bleak, certainly the most adult piece of fiction I’ve ever read, but if you can learn to bear with it I’d say it’s quite an engaging tale. The game offers a number of different ways to end the narrative, and successfully accomplishing any of the endings other than the bad ending usually rewards the player with exciting payoffs where you really feel your seemingly arbitrary choices came together to cut a path to a happier future. Even routes which you would expect to be depicted as negative based on modern sensibilities aren’t always portrayed as villain routes, and the game gives you ample opportunity to pursue your ideal world in the way that you sense is right. Characters generally take a pretty long time to develop their arcs, but it’s also interesting to see how the example you set eventually changes the people around you for better or worse, especially your family. The fates of your siblings Stephen, Gloria, and Nathan were especially engaging due to literally growing up alongside them.

There is a bit of an issue that I can’t ignore however, and that would be the narrative’s cyclical nature. Due to the strict requirements for getting a good ending the player is allowed to repeat chapters of their life as many times as they want within a single save file, and often the factors holding you back are rooted so deep in the past that you really just have to go back to start any time you meet with the bad ending. In going through that process however, you start to realize that while later chapters and the game as a whole can certainly end in many ways, the general routes leading up to them are basically the same every time. Different dialogue options afford you the opportunity to watch scenarios play out in different ways, but you will see almost all of the same events regardless. Childhood, Youth, and the first half of Young Adulthood are pretty much always the same, and even after you pick a lifepath only about half of the events are unique to those routes and are altogether still fairly linear in structure. Oftentimes I found myself just spam-clicking through the dialogue on rewind, which isn’t a great feeling in a game like this.

In the spirit of fairness the idea of a choices matter game having a linear structure is not necessarily a problem if it still manages to be a good exploration of its protagonist, such as how Triangle Strategy’s choices are more about defining the protagonist Serenoa’s personality so as to make his final choice believable. The Life and Suffering essentially attempts to do the same thing for Sir Brante, but the game punishes poor decision making with backtracking of the purest kind and fails to give an easy off-ramp for players who just want to get a decent ending and take a break. The core issue here is that this severely limits the game’s replay value in spite of having every opportunity to be replayable. On the whole I certainly think it’s worth a read if you’re interested, but you might save yourself some frustration if your repeat playthroughs are done with a bit of help from an online guide. As for the three routes themselves, they all provide greater insight into the social forces at play in their own way and will definitely be liked more or less based on your own preferences, but if I had to recommend one route it would probably be the Priest one. I know the game’s title and marketing heavily imply that Noble is the core experience and I’m probably a bit biased based on who I write for, but Sir Brante has divine visions as early as his toddler years and I couldn’t help feeling the character progression just made the most sense.

As the intro paragraph implies there isn’t too much gameplay moment to moment in The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante since it is first and foremost a visual novel. You pick an option when prompted, and sometimes options are locked for one reason or another. It is the various option locks wherein most of the ‘game’ portion of the experience lies, as in order to make most decisions you must be able to pass a stat check. These stats include measures of Sir Brante’s personality, the unity and standing of House Brante, other characters’ opinion of Sir Brante as well as their status tags, and other things that unlock as the story progresses. Of particular note is the Willpower stat, which gates your ability to make hard choices and often forces you to settle for passive or negative outcomes if you don’t go out of your way to tactically raise it. This is a fairly interesting wrinkle that keeps you from just making the optimal choice every time, although it does get less challenging to manage later in the game where even on successful runs you will often find yourself locked out of your preferred choice due to other factors and just naturally get Willpower as a consolation prize. 

As for the rest of the stats, this is where the game’s strategic side was the most evident. In my main playthrough I ended up focusing pretty hard on raising my Theology stat at first, but come the Adulthood chapter I noticed that many of the decisions I wanted to make raised my Theology over time anyways. Meanwhile my Eloquence was tragically shy of unlocking some pretty crucial decisions, and once I realized this I came up with a pretty solid plan for my ultimate run where I prioritized Determination in my childhood to get an early boost for Eloquence. The rest followed pretty naturally. While the narrative repetition problems of the do-over still definitely brought down the experience, it is fair to say that there’s something quite satisfying in seeing the game’s events in this long-term perspective and linking those disconnected events together.

Presentation wise, The Life and Suffering is fairly simplistic. The game features a distinctive black-and-white art direction for its key art, and these make up for their lack of color with rich detail that is very pleasant to look at. Most of the game is presented on a simple book UI in order to give a sense of this being a biography of Sir Brante’s life, and this leads to some pretty intuitive features like the page turning after each scene or decision, or stat screens and options menus being accessible via bookmarks. If there was anything to complain about though it would be that the book itself is not imposed on some kind of background at all, but just imposed on a pitch black void. Maybe they thought this would make the game feel more moody and constrained, but personally I don’t feel the tradeoff was worth it over making the book rest on a desk or something to really tie together the semi-diegetic presentation. The music on the other hand has no major complaints from me. It’s not a very large soundtrack so you will hear a lot of the same tracks for most of the runtime, but the pieces themselves set the mood perfectly. String orchestrals dominate the score and are punctuated by haunting use of supporting instruments, culminating in an almost howling soundscape that’s both melancholic and grand. The music doesn’t shy away from the sourness of the world it depicts, but also has that undeniable sense of coming change that subtly encourages the reader to push past the pain and see the new dawn come. Thoughts in particular is the soundtrack’s highlight for me.

Lastly we come to our spiritual reflection for The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, and this is definitely the part that lingered with me the most after playing. I’ll start with a little historical perspective so as to avoid letting the game’s biases get too out of hand, but trust me when I say what I ultimately want to communicate is positive. The world of the game is large shaped by the central concept of the three Lots of Nobles, Priests, and Commoners, and if you know anything about medieval conceptions of society then you might recognize these as being basically one-to-one matches for the Three Estates model which was most prominent in the Kingdom of France. I think it should go without saying that trying to superimpose The Life and Suffering onto our world’s past would be to make absolute caricature of history, as the notion that the Commoner’s central vocation is “suffering” would simply be ridiculous. Yes life before our modern technologies was harder for the common man, but it was also tougher on everyone. The Nobles were hardly always callous tyrants and they were expected to fight in the wars they waged, giving their vocation a dimension of suffering coupled with real danger of death (something technically implicit in the game, but muddied by presentist bias to see leaders as people who don’t suffer), and the Priests were justified through ascetic discipline and loyalty to God and His Church. There were of course those who strayed from their callings and became similar to the people depicted in the game, but looking at the entire time period through the lens of only the most corrupt examples would be unfair. Sir Brante’s world is best approached as an exploration of humanity’s failings using the Three Estates as a backdrop, but I would caution against taking it as a full on reflection of the past. It is now as it was then: to suffer is everyone’s lot, in one way or another. That Christ, carpenter, priest, and king, should find His ultimate destiny and glory in The Passion is no accident.

In any case, what really stuck with me about this story was the way it presented a world defined by failure to forgive the sins of mankind. One of the major doctrines kept by the people of the Arkanian Empire is that the Twin Gods that watch over the world are not forgiving, and though direct discussion of this is largely saved for the (amazing) character arc of Nathan Brante, you can really feel the way this belief permeates the rest of the story. Whether it’s a Noble’s inability to feel any kindness towards the Commoners or a Commoner’s unquenchable resentment for the Nobles, the absence of forgiveness makes the revolt near the end of the story all but inevitable. Encountering this narrative for the first time really made me appreciate Our Lord and the world He made for us, one where forgiveness and salvation are inextricably linked, and helped me come to the foot of the cross with all the more awe and gratitude. Additionally this title numbers among one of the few games where you can genuinely stand up for that Christian conception of the world in your dialogue options, and it truly was a beautiful thing. To just outright declare that this world wouldn’t be so miserable if the gods would just afford humanity a reasonable hope for redemption, it’s a wonder a game like this got made in 2021! It is honestly hard to fully put this experience into words except to simply say that the story truly did use its grimness to help me appreciate our world’s beauty, and that’s a gift I will be ever grateful for.

In conclusion, The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante can be a pretty difficult game to make a recommendation for, as its intensely adult story elements and botched rewind system holds it back from being suggested to just anybody. If you have the constitution to handle both of those major asterisks however, then it provides an engaging world and narrative which is sure to stick with you long after you finish. I don’t know if it features the most replayability or bang for your buck out there, but where it gets things right it really impresses. The terms “Life and Suffering” might seem to pair brutal biographical honesty and great distress on the surface, but in a way I think “Life” can also refer to the good in the world that Sir Brante encounters. Let us also do our best to remember that beyond suffering there is also much life in our own reality, and strive to never let one smother the other.

About PeaceRibbon

A graduate in philosophy from a campus with Benedictine monks, "PeaceRibbon" is just an ordinary introvert looking to put his hours of playing games to good use. He's played games on every Nintendo console since the family Wii and later took up PC games once aware of Steam. He's explored a lot of genres, but his favorites have been story driven RPGs and fighting games. Often finds himself going deep into gaming culture and seeking out low-profile titles over keeping up with big releases.

When not gaming, he enjoys walking in beautiful places, and overthinking just about everything. Also serves as a cantor at Mass whenever he can. Has a twin brother who shares many of the same hobbies and passions.