My love for playable movies is a wide as it is deep. It has its roots in the overacted FMV sections of games like Crusader: No Remorse/Regret, Red Alert and Command and Conquer. It took some time though for mixed-medium games to mature though and it wasn’t until the 2010s that we started to see developers really experiment with it. The later part of the decade brought us the live action, playable movie genre that we know today which takes much of is inspiration from the interactive fiction genre that preceded it. For whatever reason it also seems like the C-Drama scene has taken to this format more readily than others with titles like Breakout 13 garnering wide acclaim. So when I saw Road to Empress I was interested right from the get go although I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be just as wild and unhinged as it is.
You are Wu Yuanzhao, aspiring Cairen to the emperor Wu Zetian. Unknown to you at this point you are destined to become China’s first empress but to get there you need to navigate the treacherous environment of the palace where anyone can turn on you in a second in order to gain more favour and power. This becomes painfully clear when one of your childhood friends, Liu Xi, hands you a peony hairpin as a gift on your first day. Wearing such a beauty would be seen as an insult to the Consort of Preciousness as that is her most favoured flower and is not to adorn the someone of your stature in her presence. That is only the first of many betrayals you will need to overcome if you are to survive.
Making an interactive movie is no small feat and that necessitates some compromises when it comes to production. Branching narratives, even ones that are only minor (or in the case of this game, end rather abruptly) mean there’s dozens of alternative shoots that need to be done. So it’s no surprise that Road to Empress’ cinematography is simple, direct and makes use of many similar set pieces staged differently in order to stretch the production budget as far as it can. This is a drama though, most of the shots are tight in and focused on the characters, so there’s been an incredible amount of attention paid to costumes and makeup. This is all a preamble to say that Road to Empress does a heck of a lot with not much especially considering we only get to see half of the story that they’ve built.
This is also without considering the game elements of Road to Empress that bring it all together. Whilst I, a humble gweilo, don’t really understand the reasoning behind why some of the various game elements are included it’s suffice to say that a considerable amount of effort was put into creating all these ancillary elements beyond just the interactive narrative. It was similar in Breakout 13 where there were a bunch of other elements, some of which came with microtransactions that I couldn’t fathom anyone wanting to engage with, which must be par for the course for these kinds of games in the Chinese market. Still given they have zero impact on the gameplay and will help to fund the dev’s future endeavours I don’t see a downside to them at all.
Road to Empress doesn’t stray too far from the interactive fiction tropes that the genre established long ago. You’ll watch through a scene, make a dialogue choice and then watch the consequences playout. There’s a handful of quicktime events thrown in for good measure although apart from the timed ones there didn’t appear to be a way to actually fail any of them (not that I tried hard). Whilst the choices you make do have an impact on parts of the story it’s quite clear from the narrative map that the influence you have over the major story beats is pretty limited. That’s to be expected though given how hard it’d be to shoot effectively double or triple the footage for even the simplest branching narratives but it’s something that I think some people would prefer to know before they dive in.
What kept me coming back was just how insane the plot was. To be upfront, it’s not exactly the most well written thing out there, but it pulls absolutely zero punches when it comes to punishing you for seemingly well meaning decisions. Like I outlined before simply accepting a gift from a longtime friend will get you killed, as will any number of other ways of handling that interaction. After a while you start to get a feel for what kinds of decisions you have to make in order to progress the story but at the same time it’s honestly just so entertaining to choose deliberately bad or wrong ones just to see how it plays out. One of my favourites has to be when I was presented with the option to simply drink poison that wasn’t meant for me, to which the main character immediately broke the fourth wall, said “What do think this is, Road to Empress Dynasty Warriors?!?” before keeling over and sending me back to the narrative screen. Absolute cinema.
Later into the game though the narrative really starts to pick up and the emotional weight of the decisions that are forced upon you really do weigh heavily. There’s a number of sections where you’ll be faced with impossible decisions and the outcomes were truly heartbreaking. I really can’t dive further without spoiling things but suffice to say the game draws you in with choices with unhinged consequences before they make you care enough about certain characters to make the outcomes hit the emotional notes they were aiming for.
Road to Empress is yet another instalment in the interactive C-Drama genre that seems to hit all the right notes. The narrative, whilst limited in its branching and influence, is put together well with attention to detail paid in all the right placed. The additional game elements also seem to be put together well enough even if they weren’t something I really interacted with. The game’s story strikes that balance of not taking itself too seriously when it comes to the “wrong” choices whilst also making the main narrative compelling and emotionally significant. I really can’t wait to get the second instalment of this game which, I’m told, is slated for February 2026. If it’s anything like this one it’s going to be well worth the price of admission.
Rating: 8.75/10
Road to Empress I is available on PC and Android right now for $13. Game was played on the PC with a total of 6.6 hours playtime and 70% of the achievements unlocked.
