So, some thoughts! It looks nice, I don't know much about the look for this period, it struck me as a bit odd that the village had such a small stick fence and I wonder if villages wouldn’t have cleared trees a bit further from the walls to create space for farm plots and improve visibility: but we’re on minor quibbles, generally the medieval aesthetic had a reasonable if slightly “generic RPG” feel to it. Music was nicely chosen too. Gameplay was of course quite limited and it would’ve been nice to have a bit of pathing choice or something to make it feels more of a game and put more of the plot into interactions. I found the controls a bit janky and I’d rather have had either the camera solely on keyboard and the mouse free for UI selection or the mouse locked to camera movement and action with keyboard selectors for the dialogue UI, I think. The halfway house was a tad awkward.
Also it would've been good to have the text sections at the ends skippable, not because I didn't want to read them but because I read them in about a third of the time it gave me.
Regarding the history: I really like the use of primary sources. Whilst having the full burning of the village is a fair reading of this period especially for Ryazan which absolutely did suffer heavily, I thought maybe the nuance you had in some of the surrounding text could’ve worked itself into the game a bit more - there's a tendency to just portray Mongol attacks as unfocused killing, whereas things like the slaughter at Ryazan were probably quite purposeful in their horrors in order to show other cities and rulers the consequence of failing to surrender. Rural villages, on the other hand, were probably torched rather more rarely (despite what things like the Galician chronicle tend to say): destruction of supplies, fleeing before an attack, enslavement, etc were all serious threats and I think in some ways offer more story potential than the “everyone’s dead, Dmitri” approach, so for a longer game a bit more of that angle for the player might be a more interesting route. It’s also worth noting that western sources were often really quite explicit in portraying the Mongols as simple unstoppable monsters because for people who wanted a more united and ordered Christian world, talking up a bit terrifying threat to that made a lot of sense. I did like your inclusion of a nod to the connectivity of the Pax Mongolica, and generally I like the approach of having quite an ordinary, human viewpoint on some of the very harrowing realities of the worse bits of medieval history. Anyway, I gave it five stars because I thought this was a pretty fair crack at the history especially given the constraints of game jam level time allowances (and where I make critiques here, I’m thinking about them as a professional historian of a nearby region & period so I don’t want to be unfair in the expectations I’m setting!)
I was, on that note, interested that you used Hungarian/Western sources rather than translations of Russian ones like the Hypatian codex/Galician-Volhynian Chronicle. Was there a reason for that choice?
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Thank you! Yes, I'm a historian professionally (still finishing off my PhD, but I teach seminars and publish papers etc): I work on the people & politics of medieval Georgia/the south Caucasus, and also on developing computer/database driven methods for studying ancient & medieval periods. I'm based at the University of Vienna.
History is one of my greatest passions in life, but I've taken many wrong turns that have led me to live quite an isolated life- if that makes sense. Are you interested in explaining your work to me in more detail, privately if preferred? I am eager to learn more and frankly I dont have many friends.
Sure, I'd be very happy to have more of a chat about it/send some details over sometime - I guess the ones I frequent most are Discord, Twitter, Email, and the old webforums at Exilian which I help run still (you might like that space generally if you're interested in this sort of stuff, it's a small and fairly community with quite a heavy history + games crossover) - but I can probably do most other systems too, whatever works :)
To begin with, thank you for such a detailed and professional review! We really appreciate it.
Firstly, the place indeed doesn't look like your ordinary historically accurate village. On the second thought, some parts of Kievan Rus at that time were located in places unfavorable for cultivation. Therefore people were engaged not only in farming, but in fur trade. That's the reason why the village is located in a dense forest. Although, we forgot to depict fur trading and other stuff in the game, haha :)
The game came out completely linear due to the lack of time I guess. The dialogues were written 3 hours before the deadline, so all of them are clunky. The whole plot was thought up superficially beforehand but there was little time to fill it with rich content. That's the biggest flaw in my opinion. Another flaw is the dialogue system mechanic. It is weird :) We wanted it to be like one in Skyrim, but there were issues with the player camera rotating around chaotically when talking to NPCs just an hour before the deadline. So we had to do something and now we have what we have. There should have been an option to skip Intro and Outro, but we had other important things to implement first.
In terms of history, I have the same thoughts as you. The game portrays Mongols as the highest evil. However, I dislike such approach where there are the good guys and the bad ones. I think, in essence there are always the lesser of two evils. In the end, it is the common folk who gets beaten the most. I really like stories where you see the whole picture and can choose sides. Although, as I mentioned above we failed to manage our time properly to concentrate on a plot and characters.
As for the last question, we've used Western sources to show Mongols as a global threat which everyone had heard of at the time. It is not just Mongols and Russians fighting. We wanted our game to be Western oriented, so players could be like, "Hey, I'm from Hungary/Poland. Did the Mongols actually reached these lands? Did they really were so powerful?". Unfortunately, I haven't stumbled on Galician-Volhynian Chronicle. I thought of using other chronicles, but they were heavily influenced with religion themes and it was quite hard to extract a good story out of it in comparison with Western sources.
Thanks for the thoughtful response! The bit of wanting to show how the Mongols were a global threat/make it more relevant to central-east European and western gamers is interesting.
I have some digital copies of translations of Rus sources which I'd be happy to share with you if you're interested: drop me a message with your email address and I can send them over.