Ambition: A Minuet in Power was published by the development team at the Joy Manufacturing Company in 2021, following a Kickstarter campaign which dated back to 2017. Ambition is a visual novel, a genre of video game which foregrounds decision-making, characterisation, and problem-solving through dialogue, as well as a dating simulator, in which narrative trajectories are framed through the player character’s relationships with a selection of potential suitors. The Dating sim is a very popular genre, particularly in the independent and queer game scenes, with titles like Dream Daddy (2017) and Doki Doki Literature Club (2017) developing huge cult followings for their limited budgets and design parameters.
Ambition’s unique twist on the genre is in the location of its narrative in Paris at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The player inhabits the role of Yvette Decaux, fiancée to a minor provincial aristocrat, the Baron de Marbo. Yvette has come to Paris at his invitation, only to discover that he is nowhere to be found, and that the sceptical and suspicious eyes of polite Parisian society are fixed upon her. Yvette must rise through the ranks of the Parisian elite, balance the interests of the various factions at play in the pre-revolutionary city, and make enough money to keep her household together, whilst trying to track down her missing fiancé.
The game is framed around, as developer Luther Patenge described it, ‘a commitment to the idea of ‘soft power’. Yvette (our main character) doesn’t have the birthright or the position to just order people around, but she’s charismatic and clever enough to change people’s minds.’ This manifests itself in several game mechanics. Firstly, Yvette must make enough money to survive by collecting gossip, and selling it to Pierre Renaudot, a muck-raking hack journalist at Le Trompette du Peuple, a scandalous newsletter profiting from the conflict between the various factions in the city. This gossip is gathered by attending a range of social events, including poetry salons, opera performances, and soirees, organised by members of the Parisian upper crust, and tricking, blackmailing, or manipulating individuals into sharing scandalous information about their peers, drawn from known historical events. We have, for example, ‘Cheap’ news pieces, of lower value, such as Marie Antoinette’s being seen in public with an elaborate new necklace. This is a clear allusion to the 1784 ‘Affair of the Diamond Necklace’, in which Marie Antoinette was falsely alleged to have defrauded the crown’s jeweller out of a 2 million livre diamond necklace commissioned by Louis XV, an act of imagined greed and conspicuous consumption which stoked her public image as corrupt and excessive. At the opposite end of the scale there are ‘Outrageous’ or ‘Shocking’ items, such as the detention of ‘a trio of Third Estate delegates’ by the ‘Guet Royale’, reflective of the waves of arrests and reprisals as the various Revolutionary factions condemned and denounced one another through the 1790s.
Each of these scandals can be sold, but they can also be used to ‘peddle influence’, and this is where the true originality and interest of the game lies. Alongside economic self-preservation, Yvette must also negotiate her role in relation to the five factions battling over Paris – the major factions of the Court and the Revolution, and the minor factions of the Church, the Military, and the Bourgeoisie. Peddling influence allows Yvette to empower or undermine the different factions, or manipulate their relationships with one another. While the final outcomes of these choices are realised in the game’s multiple endings, which I won’t spoil here, the game’s narrative responds to Yvette’s machinations in pushing the Bourgeoisie, Military, or Church in favour of Crown or Revolution. Each faction is also represented by one of the potential suitors who form the ‘dating sim’ aspect of the game, alongside the central plot which uses Yvette’s relationship with her fiancé to explore the paranoia around exiled aristocratic emigres leading European conspiracies against Revolutionary France. The Revolution, the Military, and Court are represented by exaggerated versions of well-known historical figures; Jacobin leader Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767-1794), Saint Dominican general Thomas-Alexandre Dumas (1762-1806), and court painter and portraitist of Marie Antoinette and Madame de Stael, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) respectively. The Bourgeoisie is represented by Honorade Gazel, inspired by the story of a wealthy bourgeois widow who left her fortune to a female servant, in defiance of convention. This is documented in Sarah Maza’s 1983 Servants and their Masters in Servants and Masters in 18th-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty, which Ambition reimagines through an overtly queer lens. The Church has an entirely fictional avatar in the Italian priest, Ludovico Sidotti, whose story becomes a framework for exploring the intersection of anti-clericalism and xenophobia emerging in Revolutionary Paris. Pursuing these relationships serves the dual purpose of expanding their individual narratives, which form miniature historical fictions in their own right as well as providing opportunities for the direct manipulation of inter-factional relationships.
Taking Yvette’s relationship with Thomas Alexandre-Dumas as an indicative example, we can see the game’s two narrative techniques at play. Across the course of several dates, Thomas Alexandre-Dumas’s personality and backstory is revealed. We learn initially about Dumas’s rigid sense of military honour and propriety, his classical education and values, former life as a rake, and idealisation of his father. The fractures in this relationship are gradually revealed before, on a visit to his father’s grave, we receive the shocking revelation that his father had sold his mother and three siblings to pay for passage for himself and Thomas to travel from Haiti to France. The facts of this account do not stray far from the historical record. Thomas was the son of French nobleman Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie (1714-1786) and slave Marie-Cessette Dumas (1714–1786), and that Alexandre Antoine did indeed sell Marie and three of the children they had together in 1775. The idolisation of Alexandre Antoine by the fictional Thomas is inspired by the veneration felt by Thomas’s own son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, whose accounts of martial valour and frustrated nobility in novels like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo were inspired by his father’s experiences as both a black man in slaveholding Europe, and a member of the nobility. The younger Dumas’s characterisation of his father also informs Ambition’s characterisation of Thomas’s impeccable manners and sense of honour, including an early game encounter with a potential mugger, which could be lifted straight from the pages of a Dumas novel. The practice of drip-feeding this story to the player via the fragmented narrative of a dating sim lets the layers of Dumas’s identity emerge organically in all their complexity and resonance – the player is given space to explore a myriad of ways in which scientific Enlightenment racism can cause psychological damage. Dumas’s pride in his noble heritage initially blinding him to the moral corruption of his father intersects with his commitment to the idea that military propriety and personal honour can confer enough nobility on him for his race to become invisible. What does it mean to be both a favoured son and a piece of property, and to be indoctrinated into a system of values which ultimately does not recognise your own humanity? All these questions are raised in a handful of narrative fragments and placed in dialogue with the wider conversations around humanity and natural rights raised by the game’s revolutionary context.
On the mechanical side, Dumas is also the representative of the Military faction in the game, and through exchanges with him and other officers in the early phases of the relationship, you can steer the Military either towards, or away from, the Revolution. This process is effected through a series of apparently binary decisions. The first of these decisions is to pick whether the army should bow first to the king, or to the revolutionary cockade, a decision which in fact maps onto the intricate economy of symbols which permeated the Revolutionary period. As Robert Darnton has recently explored, the Revolution was a period of intense theatricality, in which symbolic gestures, like which symbol to genuflect towards, carried huge political weight. One famous incident of symbolic violence in the early days of the revolution centres on the cockade. There was a rumour which circulated in early October 1789, that the Royal Flanders regiment, which had been enlisted by Louis XVI to provide additional security in an already controversial gesture of distrust in the French military, had participated in a ritual degradation of the cockade. They had allegedly got drunk and stamped on it whilst singing royalist anthems, and had been joined by Marie Antoinette, according to some versions of the story. While unrest had been fomenting for months ahead of this incident, the alleged trampling of the cockade was one of the immediate inciting causes of the Parisian civilians marching on the palace at Versailles on 5 October 1789. In an indicative aspect of its discussion of soft power, Ambition highlights the significance of these seemingly insignificant, symbolic, actions.
Ambition is not without its flaws – the separation of rumours into categories, which always have the same text, means that this aspect of the game can be a bit repetitive and immersion breaking, meaning that the gameplay loop is not particularly sustainable if you stray from the main plot. The game’s twin mechanics of Peril and Credibility are also difficult to balance. You lose the game if your credibility falls too low or your peril too high, and it can be difficult to retrieve either if you fall behind. While I can see the difficulty here as both providing the challenge of the game, and a reflection of the mental and physical strain of Yvette’s activity, it does provoke either conservative or repeat playthroughs, to make sure you don’t miss out on the narratives you’ve become invested in. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game, but I’m hoping that this quick whistlestop tour has provoked your interest enough to explore the most interesting 18th-century video game of recent years.
Ambition: A Minuet in Power was released in August 2021. It is available for PC and Mac.