14 DAY TRIAL // 
It’s important to know what to wear to a party and who one needs to impress. Yvette Decaux is a woman with big dreams but knows little about the politics of Paris and parties are a great way to catch up and get some juicy gossip. Choose who to talk to and how to approach them. Dazzle with wit or simply suck up to powerful people. Try to get access to some extra funds when possible.
Influence politics if you can or simply move with the tide of Revolution and try to profit from it. There are plenty of choices for Yvette to make and not all of them will lead to a happy ending. Ambition: A Minuet in Power was developed by Joy Manufacturing Co. and published by Iceberg Interactive. I enjoyed the title on the Steam service for PC, but it can also be played on the Nintendo made Switch.
The story is built around the French Revolution. Players control a young woman who follows her husband to Paris in the months preceding the biggest event in the country's history. Armand, the charming but shifty partner, seems to be gone. So, Yvette needs to take matters into her own hands and then dress and chart a path through the coming chaos. The game sometimes does a great job of putting historical events and typologies into context. But, without some prior knowledge, some gamers might feel lost. The writing also alternates between humor and heavy topics a little too brusquely.
Talking is at the core of Ambition: A Minuet in Power. Yvette converses with a lot of people to try and reach her goals. But this is more than a historical take on the classic graphical novel concept. For each day players can choose to engage in one activity in a Paris location or they can go to a social event (and later on dates). Their main resources are credibility and peril, which are affected by dialogue choices, and money. Too much social action will also lead to exhaustion, which has negative consequences and requires a day of rest to remove.
Inside the city, there are random events to engage with and permanent locations that have certain interactions attached to them. The tailor is very important because Yvette needs quite a few dresses to make a good impression when engaging with the five factions. Dresses cost money, as does rent and wages for companions, and Yvette mainly gains francs by selling gossip to a newspaper editor.
Social events provide the main source for these rumors. Yvette needs to make a good impression and then choose who to engage with. She needs to get gossip to stay afloat or to influence the course of politics. The game also features name characters and potential romantic options that need to be engaged with separately at the parties.
There are never enough days in the calendar to do everything you want in Ambition. If you make money and keep credibility high relationships will suffer. If you invest in a love interest you might have to skip some social events and will have less gossip to work with. I had to play conversations carefully to get what I wanted and there were plenty of times when I failed.
The biggest problem with the game is that certain actions are too repetitive. Once I knew where a conversation was heading, I rarely stopped to see the text, unless I was romancing someone. The Paris activities seem limited after a while. The structure of the game makes some of this unavoidable, but the team should have aimed for a little more variety.
Ambition: A Minuet in Power is a visual novel, a choice that brings with it a number of both positives and negatives. Because the number of locations and looks is limited each has plenty of detail, although the team is clearly focused on style more than historical authenticity. But there’s quite a lot of repetition to deal with and the locations do little to reflect the beauty of Paris. The stylized and adjacent-to-anime look of the characters will also probably divide players (I initially hated it but now think it’s a good if uninspired way to communicate emotion). The sound design is less successful.
The Good
- Innovates on the graphical novel formula
- Cool historical setting
- Some engaging characters
The Bad
- The writing is a little scattershot
- Presentation has limited appeal
- Repetitive elements
Conclusion
The developers do have good ideas. I like the fact that players can start to explore a historical situation (or a big political incident or the state of a country) through the mechanics of this genre. I appreciate the mix of serious subject matter and sometimes silly romance encounters. But Ambition: A Minuet in Power needed a little more focus to convince me to play through it more than one time, even if I appreciate what it is trying to achieve.
Review code provided by the publisher.
