The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante | PC Review

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante is an interactive novel with RPG elements. It’s more or less like a choose-your-own-adventure game, but with stats you have to develop. Sir Brante is developed by Sever Studio and published by 101XP. Sever Studio is an eight-person team based in Tomsk, Russia. This is their first cooperation with 101XP. They describe Sir Brante as: “A narrative-driven hardcore RPG set in a gritty world ruled by real but unrelenting gods.” They are not wrong. Get ready for some triumphs and a lot of pain.

Uncaring World

The world where Sir Brante grows up is cold, hard, and uncaring. It’s survival of the fittest, a world where common folks are treated as expendable by the nobles, where it’s insanely hard to rise above your station. A world where the gods, the Twins, are real and have imposed very strict rules. The Church enforces these rules with an iron fist. The core belief is that every man is tied to his Lot. The Lot of the Nobleman is to rule, the Lot of the Commoner is to suffer. There is no escaping these Lots. Or is there? It’s a world that reminded me a lot of Game of Thrones.

Born To Suffer

Life is hard. But when you are born with the Brante name, your life is going to be a lot harder. You are born a commoner, but your father and older brother are nobles. Your sister is not allowed to carry the family name and your grandfather… Well, he is set on getting his family name to become a noble name on par with the Arknadians by any means necessary. You and all other spawn born from your mother stand in the way of this. And what will the Twins, the omnipresent gods, have to say about this? Whatever it is, Sir Brante will have a turbulent life ahead of him and surely a lot of suffering.

Choices Matter

Sir Brante consists of 5 chapters, with each chapter covering an age of Sir Brante’s life: Childhood, Adolescence, Youth, Peace Time, and The Revolt. Every chapter then covers several years of his life, with the amount of events happening depending on the choices made. The choices affect not only current and future possibilities, but also your stats. Every chapter has its own set of stats to develop, and those stats influence the stats of the next chapter as well. 

Some choices can only be unlocked if you reach a certain number in a stat, or sometimes if you are below a certain number. It’s not uncommon in this game to have choices locked or unlocked in chapter 4 or 5 because of things that happened in chapter 1 or 2. These choices are very important and really have weight. The first choice you make is how you come into this world!

Star Writing

The graphics are amazing. They have a very nice Middle Ages vibe and it immediately sets a certain mood for the game. There are some minor animations, and as a chapter starts, there’s also a voice over. Sir Brante has a good score that doesn’t get annoying after hearing it many times. This is all very well done.

But the undisputed star of Sir Brante is its writing. And there is a lot of it. You basically play an entire lifetime of Sir Brante. And probably not once, but multiple times. With so many choices, with at least three career choices, with many different sides to choose, there is a ton of replayability here. I played two whole playthroughs. With the last one, I also replayed the final chapter multiple times to get most of the endings. And that was just two of the career paths I could take! 

Death Is Not The End

With my second playthrough I actually managed to get to the last chapter. In my first playthrough, I suffered final death in chapter four. One of the interesting concepts in this world is that you can die three times and be reborn before dying a final time (executions notwithstanding). That first playthrough I also did in Iron Man mode, meaning that I couldn’t replay any choices. This is an option you can turn on and off, just like you can also turn on or off the visibility of the results of your choices, meaning you can base your choice on what stat gets increased. There are many things possible to make Sir Brante as enjoyable a game for you as possible.

A Real World

As soon as I had finished my first playthrough I wanted to start a second. I just had to find out what else could happen in this amazing story. That’s what the writing in Sir Brante does, it makes you really want to delve deep into the story and find out everything that happens. The worldbuilding in the game is truly exquisite. This world feels alive, the religion feels real, the pain of the character feels genuine… I adored the writing. When I finally reached the final chapter The Revolt, which takes place over a day instead of over several years, it was just as thrilling to play as was any action game, and it was all story. The writers did a truly remarkable job here.

Conclusion

If you don’t like reading, then this is not the game for you. However, if you like an extremely well-written story with multiple endings, with a dense mythology, where choices actually matter, and where you can live an entire life (multiple times), and with plenty of surprises, then The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante is the game for you. I would be very surprised if Sir Brante does not appear on my top 10 list of the best games of 2021. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go clear the table. It is my lot as a commoner.

To hear me talk more about The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, be sure to listen to Episode 337 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 47:34 time stamp.

This review is based on a Steam copy of The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante provided by the developer for coverage purposes. It is also available on the Epic Games Store, GOG.com, or directly from the publisher, 101XP.