Game review: in 1979 Revolution, you choose the narrative for a much deeper experience

From the perspective of the present, it can be tempting to view the past as an orderly succession of occurrences. Good history, whatever its form, should remind us that those caught up in the spirit of their times were not predestined to any particular outcome. 1979 Revolution is a sharp new title from iNK Stories, available for PC and OS X, that explores the Iranian revolution as a dynamic entity and not as a settled thing of forgone conclusion. This verité-style game – told with graphic-novel economy – is based on the stories of more than 40 interview subjects whose views of the revolution span different ideological lines.

Reza Shirazi, the game’s young protagonist, doesn’t know where the revolution will take him when he decides to turn his camera on the sea of people flooding the streets of Tehran in the summer of 1978. There, and across the country, workers went on strike to protest falling wages and spiralling economic inequality. Communists, democrats and Islamists were some of the factions and sub-factions that united to protest against the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Locked in their own power struggles, each of these groups saw the revolution as a platform for their agendas.

It’s beyond your ability to shape the direction of the revolution. But you can choose how Reza responds to the incidents to which he’s exposed. No matter your decisions – whether or not you accept some propaganda proffered by the idealists or throw rocks at the jittery-looking soldiers who’ve been ordered to quell discontent – you’ll alienate some of your nearest and dearest. Reza’s father, who sympathises with his son’s political restlessness, makes this point after a curtailed family dinner. Taking Reza into his confidence, he summarises his wife’s disapproval of the ongoing uprising: “But she’s accustomed to a certain way of life – a way of life that people today are protesting.”