Vive La Grind, Mon Ami

I have an odd take on this game that I don’t think I would say about many other pieces of media. We’ll put the recommendation first and analysis later, and this will be mostly spoiler-free because I genuinely believe what I’m about to recommend:

Start this game. But don’t get too attached - we’re not going to be here for very long. The prologue is the best part, and not just because they invented this awesome phrase no one has ever used before:

It’s absolutely worth booting up ‘Liberté’, running around Diablo-style hacking and slashing your way through revolutionary-era France. Bustin’ frogs and wooden crates with your rapier as a swashbuckling agent of change, intent on playing all sides for profit. The story comes at you plenty fast through the prologue and the first hour of the game. Liberté plays a bit like an ARPG, until the game throws a weird card-based deckbuilder skills progression mechanic at you (that you can pretty safely ignore for our purposes). There’s also no loot to equip, which feels like a missed opportunity. Everyone loves rusty sword or cracked wooden buckler. I bet these guys had some +1 Boots of Ankle-Snapping on when they challenged me to a breakdancing competition:

You’ll take down your first miniboss, meet the cast of characters, and the historically accurate factions of the French Revolution will be established (Rebels, Crown, Church, and Tree-Huggers). You’ll feel like Act 1 is going pretty well. You’ll reach the shop, where stuff is crazy expensive, and you don’t want to buy anything anyway because you worked hard to collect all this silver, what with all the barrel-smashing. Then you’ll stumble upon your first boss. It’ll be a tough fight, but somehow you scrape away with a win, because you’re good at video games. Cutscene, dialogue, great job, drinks all around. Time for your next mission, but this time you get to choose! There’s two options, and each one will involve helping one of the factions you just met attack one of the other factions.

At this point, you’ll be gently reassured that these factions have no institutional memory of you, so helping one destroy another will not lower your rep with the victims - only help you with the victors. To prove this, the game ominously redirects you to a sprawling, 20-part Battle Pass for each of the 4 factions with incremental resource gain, weapon skins, and unlockable cards for customizing your deck (that you still have no idea how to interact with). There’s also a foreboding mention of ‘Daily Quests’ to help boost your faction grind a tiny bit faster, so long as you log into this SINGLE PLAYER GAME every day and do specific missions to fulfill certain requirements.

Pick a mission and you spawn back in on the streets of war-torn France… at the same HP you ended the boss fight at. Which is low. You are also granted a devastating Curse that the game gleefully tells you will apply for “the rest of your Run”, which gives the sinister implication that this may not be the slow-burn world-building and exploration-based ARPG you were expecting and maybe you are about to die violently. You proceed forward to battle the first small pack of enemies on this new souped-up Cursed mission and are immediately slaughtered.

The game changes significantly at this point, and it’s quite cool. Death is not the end, and you discover that the story you thought you were really getting into has a progress marker set at 3%. You’re introduced to how the deck-building works and that there’s blessings and curses and boons and followers and skills and powers and talents and seven different kinds of currency that you need to do any of it and of course you have none of it so why don’t you just shut your pretty little face and go back up there and try again.

You pick another mission. It’s easy, like the first one last time. The ‘run’ takes about 40 minutes. You talked to everyone, and actually went shopping this time because you realized when you died you lost all your level-ups and learned skills that you spent mana on and all the Silver you looted during the tutorial. You got a big dialogue exchange that dumped a huge part of the story on you and beat the big boss, completing your mission. Suspiciously, none of the needed resources dropped, but you did get a blueprint for a new card to craft. You’re prompted to select your next mission and after careful debate, decide which faction you want to support this time. It doesn’t end up mattering because you’re slaughtered 15 seconds into the second mission once again. You check your story progress. It says 4%.

It is okay to turn off Liberté at this point.

I’ve been intentionally vague so as to not spoil the actually fun and interesting details of the plot and story setup from the Prologue and early chapters. But the progression is so horribly balanced that even flawless play will never advance the story fast enough to be respectful of your time.

And that’s it. That’s basically the entire problem with Liberté. This is a really cool single-player RPG or ARPG that insists on being a Hades-like without the combat or mission variety to justify the constant, grinding rehash intrinsic to the genre. In 3 hours of play, I encountered the same grunts from the four factions enough times to find them uninteresting, despite unlocking a new gunslinging playstyle to battle them with. Completing 3 hours worth of runs netted me enough resources to craft exactly zero new cards to customize my ‘deck’ to change my available skills. (For reference there are 126 cards in the game. You start with 32 unlocked. According to achievement-tracking websites, only 5% of players ever reach even 60/126.)