The French Revolution was a time of overwhelming and quotidian violence. As Louis Antoine de Saint-Just—the revolution's Angel of Death himself—put it in Georg Büchner's play Danton's Death, "Is it so remarkable that the stream of the revolution should at every bend and cataract cast up its corpses? … Are a few hundred dead bodies to hold us back? Moses led his people through the Red Sea and into the wilderness till the old corrupt generation was exterminated… Legislators! We have no Red Sea and no wilderness, but we have war and the guillotine!"

You know what would have made everything better? If they'd also had mechs.

This is the thesis of Bonaparte: A Mechanized Revolution, which puts you in the uniform of Bonaparte themself in the turbulent years of 1789 onwards. You know, Bonaparte! Cesar or Celine Bonaparte! The famous revolutionary hero(ine) who fought for either the Ultraroyalists, the Moderates, or the Jacobins depending on which choice you pick at the start of the game. Why, who did you think I meant?

The game bips and bops between different modes: A tactical, XCOM-ish thing where you're moving your battalions and death-robots around and setting them on your foes, and a broader strategic view where you're competing with other factions for control and influence over the different counties of France. Neither of these are hyper-complex, but they've got just enough moving parts to feel satisfying. Tactical battles ask you to think about your abilities and positioning at least to some extent, navigating behind foes to attack them from where they can't riposte, while your strategic affairs are divided between straight-up invading places and bolstering your support with propaganda efforts.

The third mode is narrative—visual novel scenes where you have tête-à-têtes with the era's notables and rally your votes to pass or reject laws in the National Assembly.

This is, if the towering battlemechs didn't tip you off, an alternate history. But it nevertheless tries to hew relatively closely to the real outline and personalities of the French Revolution as it happened. The Comte d'Artois? Still an unpleasant reactionary. Robespierre? Still very keen on virtue and terror. Lafayette? Still very bad at seeing what is obviously happening around him. Events move inexorably, towards conclusions that feel inevitable.

Except, of course, you are Bonaparte, and you make your own history. I like the game's tactical and strategic elements—they're not complicated but they have just enough depth to feel rewarding when you sink your teeth in—but it's the ability to write your own revolutionary narrative that keeps me coming back. You can sign on with any of the revolution's three main factions—the Jacobin radicals, the Moderates, or the Ultraroyalists—and fight to establish their dominance over France.

It's catnip to a particular flavour of historical-fiction-brained nerd (me), and deeply satisfying to that part of me that always enjoys imagining just what life looks like in the empires I've established in CK3, or EU4, or any other historical strategy game. Turns out the answer is 'chaotic and bloody,' but, look, nobody can reign innocently.

There's no worse feeling than going into a presentation and only being made aware of how underprepared you are after you've finished. I've felt that pit in my stomach a few times, but knowing that the CEO and studio head of CD Projekt Red has experienced this same kind of nightmare fills me with at least some comfort.

Towards the beginning of The Witcher 1's development, Adam Badowski, CDPR's co-CEO and studio head, alongside other team members, showed a demo to BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.

"I presented the demo, and this demo wasn't great," Badowski says. "Afterwards, Ray and Greg ask the question, 'Okay, so what do you want to achieve?' We said that we would like to be the biggest, the best RPG team in the industry. We would like to create the best RPG game ever." That's one way to make an impression.

At this point, CDPR only had 15 people in the team, with the hope of expanding to 35 in the not-so-distant future. Regardless of how hardworking everyone clearly was, it was undoubtedly an awkward moment around the table. After a bad demo, the realisation that it was only a small team working on this project, and the declaration that despite all of this, they wanted to make the best RPG ever. All BioWare could muster up was a "We'll call you back".

But luckily, the lasting impression must've been a good one, as eventually BioWare did get back in contact with CDPR. "They were super supportive," Badowski says. "Our first engine was from BioWare."

The engine that they ended up getting was the Aurora Engine, which powered BioWare's Neverwinter Nights series of fantasy RPGs. But those at CDPR still had their work cut out for them. "We wrote 80-something percent of the code," Badowski says. "We had no multiplayer, we removed so many, so many elements from the engine, and the render was completely new."

So I guess the lesson to be learned here is just to back yourself, no matter how bad things may be going. Yes, the demo that Badowski showed to BioWare may not have been the greatest showcase of The Witcher 1, but it did the job. "The lack of experience and the lack of understanding sometimes helps with your ambitions." Wise words from Badowski.