Review | Becoming Saint - Have You Heard The Good News?
It's easy to forget that borders are malleable and, ultimately, fictional. In Europe, their modern conception was influenced by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and subsequently enforced on colonial possessions across the globe. And yet, borders shape our lived experiences just as much as any other social construct we’re forced to exist within. Their wiggles, shifts, and shimmies across time and space tell a story of real people doing real things.
Florence-based developer Open Lab Games took inspiration for its new game Becoming Saint from a time in its home country when what was drawn on a map meant a lot less than the personal relationships between lords. Late medieval Italy provides a rich historical backdrop for this strategy game, where your character’s goal is to be canonised as a saint as quickly as possible by spreading your teachings — aggressively, if necessary.
Becoming Saint feels like it was made with me in mind, as I am obsessed with the complex politics of the places where borders shift the most. These contested lands, where diverse demographics and ideologies collide, are often fertile ground for the societal upheaval and history-making visionaries I love to learn about. Italy in the 1350s, when the game is set, was one of these places. At the start of a run, you emerge from a cave onto a peninsula defined by the centuries-long power struggle between various Holy Roman Emperors and Popes. Charles IV has recently ascended from pretender to Emperor after the death of his rival Louis IV. The Pope resides not in Rome, but Avignon, France. The Black Death decimates the population. In these uncertain times, people are eager for a strong personality to give them purpose.
This graphic is beautiful, has important data, and disappears almost immediately.
You play as a woman who receives a prophetic vision and is compelled to spread the good news. The similarities with Joan of Arc are unmistakable, and your saint’s story is likely to end the same way — burned at the stake by the Pope for heresy or beheaded by the Emperor for treason. You will always be canonised as a saint, in the end, so your score is how many years that recognition takes. Do better, and get canonised sooner. Aside from a goal for the player, this makes for a subtle but biting commentary on how long it can take for women to be canonised. For her part, Saint Joan of Arc was not canonised until almost 500 years after she was killed.
The game has a lot to say about the customs of the medieval period, mostly through satirising topics like religion and morality. Every unit description, random encounter, and bit of exposition has a quip to make. Much of it is goofily charming, in a Monty Python way. This fits well with its cartoonish art style, which features bold colours and cardboard cutout–style backgrounds. You’ll withstand a barrage of one-liners as your saint expands her territory by deploying followers in a tactical autobattler. If you lose all your followers or influence, it’s game over as you are executed for heresy. You’ll need a saint’s patience, as this roguelite lacks any progression system for subsequent runs. While enjoyable overall, gameplay is held back by obfuscated mechanics that can only be understood through trial and error, which sometimes feels unfair. The game will appeal most to history nerds like myself, but the treatment of its setting can feel superficial, as it does not fully engage with the nuances of politics at the time.
The gameplay loop will be familiar for fans of Cult of the Lamb, alternating action sequences with management of your followers. You make a selection from a starting roster of definitely-not-heretical guiding principles, called “precepts”, which determines your beginning politics and follower units, who embark on missions to convert neighbouring cities to your cause. As the saint, you can intercede with curses and blessings, but your brave followers compete mostly autonomously with each town’s defenders. After each conquest, it’s back to managing your flock: feeding your followers and adding new precepts, thus changing your politics and altering your recruitment pool.
They were not, in fact, quiet.
While I expect the first run of a roguelite to have a learning curve, I was surprised to meet with dismal failure almost immediately. I sense that Open Lab intended some degree of information obscurity — no information is given when you pick a precept for the first time except for an icon representing its associated political alignment. With no idea what I was doing, I selected precepts at odds with one another, which gave a penalty to my battle abilities. I assumed this contributed to my bitter defeat in the very first battle, so upon restarting I made sure to select more complementary precepts. I still lost, and wasn’t sure why, as the UI is both crowded and information-light. Battles are fast-paced and have lots of visual effects that can make it difficult to notice when a unit is rapidly perishing. It was not until I recruited witches as followers, by selecting a black cat as my familiar, that I was able to convert the first town. That being said, once I got through the first battle, conquest of subsequent towns felt more straightforward and my power base expanded to a significant chunk of Italy.
I found it odd that there was such a difficulty cliff at the beginning of the game, when I had relatively little control over the battle. However, seeing my influence grow over the peninsula and making choices brought me simple pleasure. I just had to be sure not to accidentally alienate one of my followers with my choices, since the game provides no advance information on how your followers’ willingness to obey you will be affected by any given decision. Choosing incorrectly will cause a unit to immediately leave your service, which can mean suddenly losing a veteran follower that you had been relying on. Precepts can be very similarly worded, or have political alignments that feel disconnected from their wording. Choosing to tolerate male stage actors but not female ones, for example, is bewilderingly aligned to the “capitalist” ideology. So is choosing to exile the leaders of captured towns instead of executing them. As a result, the consequences of choices at times feel random.
After committing a few hours to my third playthrough, I amassed enough resources and followers that my eventual conquest of the map was a foregone conclusion. I staved off the Pope’s crusade against me. Once I controlled more than half of the cardinals and Rome, I could depose him, declare myself Popess, and finish the run. I proceeded to repeat the same basic battle until victory, and achieved the best possible score: becoming a saint in my lifetime. Different units and political choices didn’t have enough impact on the gameplay to warrant another run. I had performed miracles, and blessed the downtrodden, but I mostly forcibly “converted” cities of people by setting lepers upon them. This felt somewhat unsaintly, but history is actually full of saints that did hardcore stuff, such as Olga of Kiev, who burned an entire city to avenge her husband’s death.
These choices are supposed to be different, and do different things, but are all worded similarly.
Becoming Saint does not let any opportunity to poke fun at medieval Europe slip by, but sometimes it misses the mark. The “squad of deflowered maidens” felt awkward because, aside from leaning on a cheap cliché for humour, it ahistorically references a prudishness toward sex which is more akin to Victorian mores. This game has taken great care in representing medieval Italy, so I would not have expected it to fall into the trap of conflating the attitudes of different historical periods. Compared to other games that take liberties with history, it’s missteps like this that cause Becoming Saint's humour to read as modern in spirit, possessing a medieval host. In contrast, the comedy in Crusader Kings, which includes the same time period, is tied to the zany situations that its emergent gameplay often produces. Because its rules are based on real medieval law and events, this humour is rooted in the time period, and things that happen can bear a remarkable likeness to real events. In Becoming Saint’s case, this incredibly interesting time period could, at times, be interchanged with any backdrop to the action.
I’m sure Open Lab drew much inspiration from setting its game in one of the most unique periods in Italian history, and yet representation of the time can verge on generically medieval. For example, I felt the treatment of the Guelph-Ghibelline divide, a fascinating historic conflict which greatly influenced medieval Italy, was a missed opportunity. As your prophet makes choices about her teachings, her political leanings will shift along eight alignments. Among these are “Guelph”, supporters of the Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor, and “Ghibelline”, supporters of the Emperor against the Pope. The conflict began over the power of investiture: who should be able to appoint bishops and other religious authorities, the Emperor or the Pope?
However, by the time that Becoming Saint is set, the antagonism between the Guelphs and Ghibellines had devolved into a feud that would rival the Montagues and Capulets. A thread on the AskHistorians subreddit details how the minutiae of local power struggles between and within Italian city-states had at that point displaced much of the original ideological dispute, meaning that in practice a Guelph was more often defined by their opposition to whatever the local Ghibellines wanted, and vice versa. The idea of people picking opposing politics just because they disliked each other seems like a layup for the kind of satire the game has established it wants to perform. Instead, Becoming Saint — which takes every other opportunity to be quippy — does not engage with the contradictory nature of Guelph versus Ghibelline at all. This left me confused, because Open Lab so clearly cares about representing this time in its home country. It’s a choice of period which is sure to make the game stand out to history buffs, and yet the setting felt disconnected from the gameplay because its narrative does not interrogate a core conflict in the region at the time.
Look at me. Look at me. I am the Pope now.
I appreciate that Open Lab put the time and care into representing an oft-overlooked part of its country’s history. I liked seeing a game created with funding by Creative Media Europe, and I hope to see future investment by the EU. There was an opportunity to do more with the history or the humour that could have elevated the game to greatness, but I nevertheless enjoyed myself for its short runtime. Becoming Saint provided me with the power fantasy of sweeping across the land with the meek and disenfranchised at my back, overturning a church corrupted by its worldly power. Was I bringing back the original meaning of Scripture, or was it something more self-serving? Perhaps I was just a heretic in the end, but what is heresy and what is orthodox, like history, is written by the victors.