• Price: $19.99 USD (currently on sale for $14.99 until July 21st)
• Developer: Joy Manufacturing Co.
• Publisher: Iceberg Interactive
• Release Date: July 14, 2022

A review code was kindly provided by Iceberg Interactive on behalf of Joy Manufacturing Co. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Content warning: Ambition: A Minuet in Power is rated T, and it’s set during the French Revolution. Mentions of violence and suggestive themes appear throughout the game.

I remember reading A Tale of Two Cities in high school; it was one of the only required books that I liked because it was interesting to me. Madame Defarge putting the names of her enemies into her knitting was morbidly fascinating. The atmosphere in France during the French Revolution was obviously quite tense. Ambition: A Minuet in Power gives you the chance to experience the turmoil of those times, with politics, secrets, fashion, and even some romance. Make good choices, and perhaps you’ll avoid the dreaded guillotine.

The game opens with your character, Yvette, traveling from her small town to Paris to reunite with her fiancé, Armand. At the designated meeting place, Armand is nowhere to be found, and when you ask around, you discover that Armand has made a powerful enemy. After one person tells you that, mentioning Armand’s name results in people leaving your presence in a hurry.

You’ll need to find out where Armand has gone, but in the meantime you’ll need funds to survive. Attending parties and other events will allow you to obtain valuable society gossip that can be sold to a newspaper. There are different levels of gossip – cheap gossip will provide you with less money compared to gossip that’s “shocking.”

You can sell any gossip you find to a newspaper called “La Trompette du Peuple” both to make some money and to manipulate public opinion regarding the different factions. These factions include the revolutionaries, the Crown, the Church, the military, and the bourgeois. When you talk to people, you’ll occasionally have the opportunity to guide the decisions that they make – what you say will impact your credibility and peril stats, but also the course of the Revolution.

Pierre, the smarmy owner of the newspaper, will make requests for gossip about specific factions from time to time. He’ll provide you with additional funds, an increase in your credibility stat, or a reduction in your peril stat as a bonus for the requested information. You need to be careful about how much gossip (and what gossip) you provide because things will become more difficult if the rumors can be traced back to you.

When someone tells you some gossip at a party, they don’t really tend to go into detail and it just says that you acquired some gossip. You can see a brief explanation of what the gossip is when you go to sell it to Pierre, but it may have been nice to have people tell you the stories directly instead.

Each event you attend provides you with a set amount of turns to engage in conversation with your fellow partygoers. Most of the conversations appear to be randomized, although there are main characters who show up as options as well. Some of the same random options would appear several turns in a row, which was odd. I’d see that same conversation two or three times in a row at an event and receive the same exact kind of gossip in those conversations. But I really liked how they also randomized the “archenemy” who defames you in each playthrough. In my first playthrough I confronted a male archenemy, and the next playthrough had a female antagonist. They had different subplots for you to get revenge on them as well!

Your credibility stat is incredibly important; the game will let you check what level of credibility is best for a dialogue choice, but you can still select that option even with low credibility. Such choices don’t tend to work out well, but you can still make them. When you make a choice that requires more credibility – and you have that amount – you’ll end up better off. I like that the game lets you know if a choice is really important or simply for characterization purposes because it reduces the anxiety when making choices.

Different factions prefer different styles of dress, and wearing the right style can increase your credibility with them, which will make them trust you more. Your looks will lose their novelty the more you wear them (which can reduce your credibility stat) so it’s important not to wear the same dress a lot. You can sell your older outfits to a local boutique and purchase new ones there. I thought that the outfits were really pretty, although there were a lot of the same dresses in different colors. I assume that there were a limited amount of styles that were “en vogue” at the time, but I still wanted a little more variety there.

Managing your funds and social calendar is the primary focus of the game. You have to pay rent and your maid’s salary, buy new outfits, and occasionally use your funds to bribe people. (Hiring someone to personally deal with your clothing, a bodyguard, or a spy is also possible for a price.) Party invitations will frequently appear, and accepting or rejecting invitations will affect your credibility. You’d think it would be better to accept every invitation that comes your way, but each event increases your exhaustion stat. The more exhausted you are, the more credibility you lose.

Unfortunately, you can only do one thing a day. You can’t go and sell gossip to make money for a new dress and then go straight to the dress store. You have to sell gossip one day and then go buy an outfit the next. You can’t view a story or character event and then do something else on the same day. Time management is a huge part of the game, but I would have wanted at least two time slots a day instead of only one.

In my first playthrough, I think I attended too many parties and didn’t focus enough on the Revolution. Then in my second playthrough, I focused a little less on parties and more on the romantic subplot. By my third playthrough, I realized that I’d been focusing too much on my funds when selling gossip instead of using it as a tool to affect the events of the Revolution.

Balancing parties, story/character events, money, and the Revolution is a difficult task. I did like that they included romance options in the game for a bit more frivolity in such trying times. Although Armand is Yvette’s fiancé, you can still choose to go out on “rendezvous” with other characters – which includes the women! (Apparently France became “the first Western European country to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults.”)

The regular rendezvous could be a bit boring for me because they were mostly the same thing each time with the same dialogue. Wearing a dress that corresponds with their preferred faction can significantly increase their affection for you, but other than that the rendezvous don’t have much substance. They do impact your relationship levels though, and sometimes those rendezvous will trigger conversations with them that unlock character events on the map.

Additional developments occur when you meet a love interest at a party. Love interests tend to favor specific factions, so you’ll need to be careful with who you criticize. Ambition has an interesting mechanic where you can change your relationship level with someone even when they’re not there by saying or doing something for/against their favored faction.

The game says that the Crown and the Revolution will always oppose one another, but the loyalties of the Church, Military, and Bourgeoisie remain up for grabs. The choices you make will have interesting effects on French society. Some characters seem to be based on people who actually existed, like Élisabeth the painter. It also seemed like there was an alternative version of the Storming of the Bastille and an alternative version of the Women’s March on Versailles in one storyline.

I really liked the writing in Ambition (I particularly appreciated the use of the word “skullduggery”). It was disappointing that the game did not include a log to check the recent dialogue, or a skip function that is usually included in visual novels. I think they did do a good job of portraying the events of the French Revolution, as well as the frivolous and excessive parties held by French elites. I got some laughs at the snarky jabs and silly, overexaggerated reactions (as shown above).

It’s been a long time since I brushed up on my French history, and I enjoyed learning and relearning about different aspects of eighteenth century French society (such as the Estates). They made it interesting and I had fun managing everything across the brief prologue and three chapters.

Switch it ON or Switch it OFF? Ambition: A Minuet in Power is a great visual novel/management game with a lot of content. I would have liked more detailed gossip, rendezvous, and additional clothing, and it unfortunately lacked log/skip functions. But I think they did put a lot of effort and detail into the historical aspects of the game, and they even added love interests to the mix that were based on historical figures. It felt like my choices actually mattered for the most part, and I managed to help bring both the Crown and the Revolutionaries to victory in different playthroughs. If you enjoy history, romance, subterfuge, and managing different stats, you might want to give this game a France chance! 8/10