All power comes from the people. And never returns to him.Gabriel Laub (Gabriel Laub), Polish writer and journalist
If, looking through the news, you, just like Sergei Yuryevich Belyakov, think that there are only fools around who have screwed up such a country and that in their place you would have shown how to manage people and manage the budget, then I hasten to inform you that you have a good chance to realize your ambitious aspirations and show leadership qualities to help the common people. True, only in virtual format. But it’s almost as if you expected anything different from a video game site!
Debut project of the St. Petersburg studio “Brezg” called For the People will give you the opportunity to try your hand at being the mayor of the small industrial town of Zhelezny-1. Will a manager become intoxicated with power?? Will people’s love await him?? Or maybe people’s anger? All this will be on your conscience.
The party said: “We must!” Orsomist replied: “There is!»
The world in which events take place For the People, similar to the real thing, but with its own nuances. So, instead of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the game features the Commonwealth of People’s Orange Communes with Comrade Still at its head. Just like in the USSR, a socio-economic crisis was brewing in SNOK in the late 1980s. The people became disillusioned with the government and the official ideology, and theft and bribery began to flourish in the workplace.
Trying to correct the situation, the party decides on progressive and bold reforms. For example, he makes the very young (but very promising) Francis River mayor of one of the cities. He’s the one we need to play for. On September 12, 1988, Francis takes office as head of the city committee and begins to restore order in Zhelezny-1, while trying to please both the local population and the authorities, because if the approval ratings of the people or the party drop too low, the hero will simply be removed from office, and the game will end.
Information about the historical past of the Commonwealth can be gleaned from the map that hangs in the mayor’s office. Narrators from the Brezg studio approached the issue as scrupulously as possible and chronicled past events in great detail.
He who doesn’t work doesn’t eat
The whole game is divided into days, in each of which you will have to not just sit in the mayor’s chair, but deal with the problems of citizens, send your agents on missions, distribute resources and sometimes even feel like a real detective. Francis is constantly visited by visitors – heads of other departments, old acquaintances and the charming secretary Helen. At such moments For the People is a pure visual novel, the choice of lines in which influences further events and relationships with the characters.
In his free time from receiving visitors, Francis needs to attend to his official duties. All of them are tied to interactive objects in the office: piles of papers, letters, telephones, city maps. Routine affairs do not advance the plot of the game, but rather complement it and allow us to learn a little more about the Commonwealth of People’s Orange Communes and its inhabitants.
Comrade River’s office and its main decoration – a bust of Mayakovsky (or someone very similar to him). What did you think?
Our goals are clear, tasks are defined, let’s get to work, comrades!
Every day, Helen brings Francis https://nongamstopsites.uk/review/betfoxx/ a stack of requests from residents of Zhelezny-1, and the order of these requests and demands changes in different passages. Someone wants to organize an exhibition, and for this he needs financial support, someone complains about the poor quality of products in stores, and someone suspects their friends of sympathizing with capitalists and other enemies of the party. You are free to decide what to do with these statements: which ones to listen to in order to get your share of the love of the townspeople, and which ones to ignore in order to save your budget.
Sometimes you begin to experience slight irritation from paperwork: you want to quickly skim some extravagant denunciations and throw them in the trash. Apparently, the authors had a similar reaction to this part of the gameplay For the People and planned to get. Bureaucratic red tape should be like this: sorting through voluminous, generously flavored appeals from clerical staff from not quite adequate people will not seem like a fun activity to anyone.
Letters from townspeople are small stories that do not affect the main storyline, but they immerse you more into the game world. Some of these stories may develop – if at one time you were greedy to allocate money to solve a problem, then in the future you may have to pay a much higher price.
We have no irreplaceables
Using a map of the city on the table, Francis can send his agents on missions to problematic institutions of Zhelezny-1. Let’s say you received information that the editor of a local newspaper is harassing female employees, which means it’s time to start an investigation and send your person to the office. You can try to solve a problematic situation in different ways: persuasion, observation and, of course, brute force. When sending agents, you must understand which one is best suited for a particular task.
The only catch is that choosing even a person who seems to fit the description will not necessarily lead to success. I once sent a physically strong agent, who served in the people’s militia and now works as a firefighter, to knock down the door to an apartment to save an old man, but the former soldier was unable to cope with the task. The next time I chose a simpler agent – it was written in his biography that he also served, but now works as a plumber – and now he has already completed his mission. How it was possible to immediately guess who would be more correct to send is unclear.
You only have six scouts at your disposal. Their composition depends, among other things, on which departments you financed at the beginning of the game.
An agent cannot be sent immediately after one assignment to another, so when a new assignment appears, you may not have the right person on hand. At first it’s unnerving, but then you realize that all this reconnaissance, in fact, does not affect the main game at all and you can fail missions one after another. Yes, the party will be disappointed in you, but in order to lower its level of trust to the very bottom, you will have to try very hard.
It’s much easier to disappoint ordinary people. From time to time they need food, medicine, non-food items and fuel. According to the rules of the game, none other than the head of the city committee should distribute the products of the metallurgical plant and exchange them for vital resources. At the release, many complained that management was added to For the People Just for show, this mechanic lacks elaboration and a user-friendly interface and, again, the game needs it like the fifth wheel of a cart.
The developers listened to the feedback and released a patch quite quickly. True, they managed to deal with the problematic mechanics in a unique way – the game became more difficult. Epidemics, shortages and hunger constantly occur in areas, and it is no longer so easy to get life-saving goods and medicines. Thus, manipulations with resources from a segment that was simply needed for no clear reason turned into a segment that was just as necessary for no clear reason, but which required more attention.
Work is also underway on the interface. So, in one of the recent updates on the resource allocation screen, the size of the buttons has slightly increased.
Art belongs to the people
For the People very well written. The authors of the game, in all this heap of papers and events taking place around the hero, managed to convey the spirit of the Soviet era. Well, the novella looks quite decent. It itself is black and white, but there are splashes of orange in it. It’s interesting that in the game it replaces red in meaning, that’s why “Top Secret” is there! Code orange!”, and “The Great Orange Revolution”.
But this whole story ends very quickly. For the People you can walk through it in less than three hours, even reading all the letters and appeals from citizens. At first it seems that the game will be monumental and will show the long-term consequences of our actions, but in fact its time frame is limited to only two weeks of September. When the end credits begin, you feel a slight sense of unsaidness. The story lacks scale, and the speed with which events develop seems implausibly high.
Sometimes they show us how the newly minted city ruler spends his leisure time. The illustrations in such segments are more like sketches – their drawing is much more careless than the images of key characters and the interior of the office.
It turns out that in For the People we, on the one hand, have an interesting setting and a good plot, and on the other hand, a number of rough edges that do not allow us to fully experience it all. The head of the city committee does not face serious moral dilemmas, and the right decisions in most cases are obvious (unless, of course, we are talking about sending agents on missions!). Helping the residents of Zhelezny-1, Francis is not walking on a knife edge. You can, of course, play the part of a heartless manager and enter into a corruption conspiracy, but why?? The main character is already in a high position and needs little.
While passing through it is difficult not to notice that For the People – this is the studio’s debut “Brezg”. The developers obviously did not set themselves the task of making a big game. For the People attracts people primarily with its world, and if the player had more time to get comfortable there, and even better, to seriously influence this world, it would be absolutely wonderful. Or rather, pre-orange, of course.
Pros: a detailed setting that is interesting to immerse yourself in; nice visual style; charming secretary Helen.
Cons: the uselessness of some mechanics; the game ends quickly and does not have time to reach its potential.
