1979 Revolution: Black Friday

The chapters consist mostly of 1–5 minute cinematics with only a handful of QTEs and choices, bringing the total playtime to under two hours. The story feels abruptly cut short, as if development was halted mid-way. [b]RATING: 2/10[/b]

In 1980, I went to school in New York City with the Shah of Iran’s daughter. For a year, Leila was a classmate of mine. She appeared shy and sad, always under the watch of armed security who stood in our school’s windows. My mother almost didn’t let me go, but I went anyway. What I saw was the private side of a young girl — innocent of her father’s politics — who had been ripped away from everything she knew. The reality was far darker outside that classroom. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi ruled Iran with an iron hand, enriching his circle while much of the country lived in poverty. His secret police, SAVAK, became infamous for surveillance, torture, and disappearances. Opposition voices were silenced, and unrest grew. By 1979, the Iranian Revolution forced the Shah and his family into exile, leaving his children — like Leila — to live with consequences they had no hand in shaping. She later took her own life, as did one of her brothers. This game struck me because it attempts to tell stories from inside that kind of nightmare, forcing players to make decisions under impossible circumstances. It captured the atmosphere of displacement and fear. But I found myself wanting more. The narrative only skimmed the surface of why these events happened and how they scarred the people involved. My only complaint is that it left me hungry for the deeper history that explains why lives like Leila’s unraveled the way they did.

How to make a country miserable for 40 years, play this game to understand , Thank you if you give a reward

This is the most unbiased and the most educational video game about iran and the iranian revolution it perfectly portrays the iranian culture and it has actual real life footage of shah era, the atmosphere is amazing HOWEVER, the persian subtitles are unpolished, it has technical and grammer issues, just use english subs if you speak persian

A so-called masterpiece of propaganda, masked with a touch of deception and a blatantly one-sided perspective. Utterly disgraceful.

Just finished it... Absolutely fascinating. Thank you Navid Khonsari.

How it started: play this game. How it's going: check the news.

This is a very qualified thumbs up. There's a lot about 1979 Revolution: Black Friday that is frustrating, in particular its ending (where they planning, or hoping, to continue this story?). The choices are Telltale-style, but they mostly fall flat, changing little about the story and (more importantly) how you feel about the story and characters. And the failable quicktime events should have been left out: they're not thrilling or fun. But when 1979 Revolution tells its story about a time and a place in history that is rarely touched on in Western culture, it is fascinating, and it does a good job of introducing players who might not know much about the Iranian Revolution to the topic without feeling too overtly didactic. I wish they'd had the chance to continue 1979 Revolution, learn from the first game and deliver a more polished, and story-wise more satisfying, follow-up.

Great acting, directing, music, and dialogue writing don't make up for a brief (2 hours or so) Telltale-like choose your own adventure story. The story itself is very confused as to what it wants to be and feels incomplete as it will abruptly end.

If nothing else, the game convinced me to go look up some historical stuff, never a bad thing to learn more about the world, good, bad or otherwise.