Road To Empress

Road To Empress was provided by New One Studio for review. Thank you!

While never having played an FMV game before, I have watched them be played, and it's fascinating to see this niche genre expanding and essentially building interactive movies with deep narratives. Road To Empress is no different, with a story inspired by Wu Zetian, China's only female Empress.

While inspired by the story of Wu Zetian, and featuring real-life historical figures, the game is rightly "inspired by" and not "based on", so don't view it as a history lesson. The game is beautifully filmed, though, and the actors and actresses do an incredible job of portraying their characters; it all feels very authentic, and you definitely feel tense during certain moments as you get wrapped up in all the drama and political intrigue.

And the drama is pretty non-stop, there's not really anything I'd call "filler" here, and for an FMV game that is several hours long, that's impressive. Almost all of the 16 chapters introduce a new character or interesting plot point, and while it can be a little difficult to keep track of all the characters and their alliances, it is a well-constructed story.

I really ended up invested in the characters in Road To Empress, seeing what their next move would be and who I could really trust. You get an attachment to certain characters, only for them to betray you, while others may surprise you. The story isn't too emotional, but there are moments that pull on your heartstrings a little. Any "bad endings" are usually covered with quick text explaining what happened after your decision and possibly a short video, so you don't see too much of your "demise" at any point.

Ultimately, this is a story about ambition, trust, manipulation, and ruthlessness, usually all happening at the same time. Who can you manipulate to protect you from your current threat? Who can you trust, if anyone? How ruthless will you have to be to survive? It made me make choices that I perhaps wasn't comfortable with myself, but in the situation, something you would have to do if you wished to succeed. Wu Zetian wants to gain power and influence, and she increasingly doesn't care what she has to do in order to achieve it.

All of this is backed up by sets/environments that also feel like feudal China; this could just as easily be a modern film that you see in the cinema, but instead, it has some "choose your own adventure" options to spice things up.

There are the occasional "Quick Time Events", which are a tad annoying, requiring you to click an icon on the screen to succeed or fail some tasks; these took me out of the story a little bit, but they are quite rare.

That being said, some choices in the game can be rather arbitrary. You pick a seemingly innocuous choice, a 30-second video plays, and you're dead. This happens frequently, and the game often boils down to 1 good choice and 1 bad choice that immediately ends the game. It's kind of frustrating, and sadly makes the "game" not as open-ended or as branching as you might hope. It is, at least, quick to go back on the "timeline" and select where you want to keep playing from again.

Road To Empress is voiced in Chinese, and so if you aren't able to understand the language, you'll be relying on subtitles. Keeping up with the subtitles can be a challenge, though. Sometimes the game will only show 3 or 4 words at once, giving you less than a second to read them before another character interjects or the next sentence begins.

I would have loved for longer subtitles to be used so that I could focus more on the scene and characters, but as it is, I had to keep my eyes glued to the subtitles so I could understand what was going on. I also noticed a couple of times when lines were said and no subtitles were present, leaving me confused about what just happened. This is especially true for some endings, which are not translated at all.

The game did default to Chinese for me, so I needed to get past the main menu and into the game to access the settings menu, where I could select "English (US)" as a language.

It's also worth noting that Road To Empress does require an internet connection to play. Attempting to boot without an internet connection resulted in the game closing out for me. This is likely due to Micro-Transactions being present in the game, but it seems like the MTX might be entirely linked to "donating" gifts to the game's characters in order to gain places on the leaderboards, and has no actual impact on the game whatsoever.

Road To Empress - Steam Deck Performance

Note: Upon first boot, the game does ask for you to confirm your age and agree to a privacy policy, and this page is blank on the Steam Deck, so I had to download and boot the game on another device to acknowledge the prompt, after which, I could play on the Steam Deck. (This may be fixed now, but I cannot test due to my account already being age-verified)

As Road To Empress is an FMV game, where all "graphics" are pre-rendered videos, there are no graphical settings in the game. The game tends to stutter when first playing a video. I recommend you click in the game once videos start playing and change the quality at the bottom right from "4K" to "FHD"; it still looks identical on the Steam Deck's display, but it helps reduce some stutters.

The game can be set to run at 30 or 60 FPS, which is odd, considering all the videos are 25 FPS files, but there's no harm in selecting 60 FPS on the Steam Deck.

Power draw is around 8-9W, and temperatures are around 50 °C- 55 °C. Battery life is around 6 hours on a Steam Deck OLED and around 4 hours on a Steam Deck LCD.

Accessibility:

Road To Empress has no accessibility options. There are subtitles available for a few languages, including English, as all voice acting is in Chinese.

Conclusion:

Road To Empress is a quality FMV game. Yes, it has some issues that are common to the genre, like a story that's a bit more linear than I'd like, but given the quality of the cinematography and acting, you can understand if the developers couldn't film a bunch of different outcomes. It's a thoroughly enjoyable and immersive time for the few hours you'll get out of it.

Performance on Steam Deck is almost perfect, just the minor stutters when a new video file starts playing are a little off-putting, and the age verification issue that can hopefully be rectified, but otherwise, you can definitely play from start to finish on the Deck just fine.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.