Narrative game Football Drama makes the beautiful game actually beautiful

Lets talk tactics.

Three football games pretty much eclipse the market when it comes to anything to do with the sport, and with each of them (FIFA, PES and Football Manager obviously) coming out with new iterations each year, its pretty hard to compete when it comes to the beautiful game. So if you can’t beat them, why not do something else entirely. Well, Football Drama is certainly doing that. Giving football the center stage in a narrative game that includes a talking cat, this eccentric title is something to get excited about.

In Football Drama you’re cast as the manager of Calchester Assembled, a suitably fictional yet very League One sounding football team. You’re Rocco Galliano, the cigarette smocking, cat chatting, previous manager of Marseillaise. Calchester is a brand new chance for you, after a bit of a shady coaching past. The ailing team’s fate is on your shoulders.

Gameplay unfolds over a series of dialogue choices, framed by beautifully illustrated comic-book panels. According to the game’s Steam page, your narrative choices bring you down either the path of karma or chaos, as you make decisions on both Galliano’s football tactics and life decisions. The drama takes place over ’18 dramatic weeks of procedural championship where you can be fired at any time’. Choose how you’ll handle your team via card mechanics and build a deck full of the weirdest occurrences in football.

According to the developers at Open Lab Games: ‘Football Drama was started after discovering and exploring the richness and quality of the literature about football. Novelists and poets like Pasolini, Galeano, Soriano, Hornby, Saba, Handke, Wenders have written about football and its evocative and poetic power. Same in movies, with fringe and beautiful works like The Lost World Cup or Wender’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.’

Its a new way of analysing football that really does expand on the literature that has been emerging over the last few years. It’s nice to see a topic usually regulated to simulation brought into the world of narrative, considering there really is a lot of drama that happens in football. If you like the look of Football Drama too, you can get it on September 18th from Steam.