Spoiler warning: This piece contains plot details of 1348 Ex Voto.
By the time Joan of Arc was 17, England and France had been locked in a brutal, intermittent campaign of dynasticism for over 90 years. But after copious personal strife and revelation, the Armagnac-aligned maiden donned the clothing of a man, cut her hair into a bowl crop, and set out through la Porte de France in Vaucouleurs to break the siege of Orléans in just nine days, and finally meet the motherfucking Dauphin herself. She had a plan to save Charles VII from the Burgundians and France from the English, and she didn’t care if that didn’t fit what other people expected from her.
1348 Ex Voto begins 11 years into the start of what would be known as the Hundred Years’ War. And while Joan of Arc’s parents have not even been born yet, far to the to the southeast of France, beyond the Regnum Alemanniae, along the spine of Italy, in the chalky, rugged Campanian Apennines, a young girl named Aeta has cut her hair into a pageboy. Her surprisingly permissive noble family has let her don the clothing of a young knight errant and take up the sword. Perhaps they were inspired by the same gender non-conforming saints who would be trotted out to defend Joan during her trial—Pelagia, Thecla, Marina, et al. Either way, it is the prerogative of nobility that finds her playfighting her best, and seemingly only “friend” in the opening cinematic, as Arthur and Mordred.
Everything you need to know about 1348 Ex Voto occurs in the opening narrative cutscene/tutorial. This is also everything you will get about the world of 1348 Ex Voto. Aeta, our young and naive knight, is seemingly obsessed with two things: Italian adaptations of French Arthurian romances, and a shrewd, forthright, and very blonde peasant postulant (read: she’s getting herself to a nunnery because there’s no other options for her) named Bianca. Bianca is obsessed with what she feels are the rigid class structures of the late Middle Ages, and Aeta is entirely oblivious to just how devoted she is to upholding them. While Bianca loses the tutorial sword fight, it’s Aeta’s fixation on being Lawful Stupid and falling for her beautiful blonde’s “m’lord, won’t you save a damsel in distress” that is her undoing, both here, and in the end. Dragging her to the ground and immediately subduing her, Bianca playfully pulls a knife on Aeta, and playfully threatens her life.
Sometimes in video games your girlfriend gets kidnapped and you have to go find her. And, sometimes, your girlfriend just told you she’s The Mordred and You’re The Arthur, and your bimbo knight ass is getting played like a lute for the next four hours. So, when brigands sack the city the two of them call home, forcing Aeta to slash her way through clustered arenas of peasants-turned-marauders only to find a dropped, titular Ex Voto (a sacred token offering for her girlfriend’s now-postponed journey to the monastery), it should be clear that Aeta’s being played.
For all her Vulgate Cycle reading, Aeta failed to understand the one important lesson: Mordred will betray you, even if it means you’ll both die. If you’ve seen the John Boorman film, Excalibur, you’ll know that Mordred is a pretty and conniving blonde, Arthur is a fool of a knight, and they both die awfully in a shot that is absolutely referenced here.
While these two young girls may have missed the Great Famine, they haven’t missed the worst of the 14th century. The Black Death arrived on Genoese trade ships, ravaging the city of Messina before the sailors could be expelled, just a year prior to the start of our story. From there it spread like wildfire through a wholly unprepared Kingdom of Sicily, hopping over to the toe and then fully up the boot of Naples through the Papal State. Genoa became its own flashpoint as well, and the plague swept on towards the Duchy of Milan and the Republic of Venice, where it would join other concurrent waves of infection so that every corner of Europe would know the horrors of Yersinia pestis in an age without Doxycycline. Class divisions certainly become apparent when half the world gets wiped away by an unseen assassin.
As erstwhile cordwainer and tax collector Agnolo di Tura recalls in his own chronicle of how society collapsed around him as the plague hit Siena, “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices. Nor did the death bell sound. And they died by the hundreds both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered over with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug.”
While the Black Death isn’t outright hidden in Ex Voto, it barely earns more than a few lines of voiced dialogue. Aeta will mention places that have been burned out and abandoned in response to the plague, a few people she knows who died. A far cry from the pandemic that killed anywhere from 25-60% of Europe, ground economic development to a halt, and would take nearly 200 years to recover from. The Unreal Engine 5 Italy of Ex Voto is far too serene and beautiful, too clean and genericized, to represent a land undergoing such devastation. This is a world of photogrammetry vistas, asset shop trees, and an unimaginable amount of the palest blue-grey Apuan stone. There are no burial pits, stacks of burning corpses, the sputum and buboes of the dying. Even when Aeta runs into crazed group of Flagellants (who peaked so hard during the Second Plague Pandemic that Pope Clement VI had to issue a bull condemning them in 1349), she doesn’t have thoughts about the disease that’s, in theory, upending the world as she knows it. Aeta doesn’t really have many thoughts at all. Like the plague, like her religion (which really only gets gestured at in the broadest, simplest strokes), even the events around here are secondary to “find Bianca, save Bianca.” If Aeta isn’t given space, time, or inclination to consider the spasms of the world around her, she also doesn’t use it to consider who the Bianca she’s saving even is.
In a way, I feel for the developers. Titling your game with a year is explicitly calling attention to the history you’re trying to evoke—and this game has very little interest in finding ways to include it, focusing instead on ways to make a very small and short game with dodgy combat appear more like 2018’s God of War.
Aeta moves from Keep to Keep from Ancient Forest to Roman Villa in a daze of narrative urgency. Always chasing after Bianca, with the game never pausing to take stock of the fascinating setting of an Italy in the midst of collapse and rebirth. It will never populate the world with people who aren’t an immediate narrative driver, and even then they’ll be given such a paucity of words you’d wonder why they even exist.
Press A to shimmy through a narrow passageway. Press A to vault, press A to crouch, press A to signal that something other than running through a gloomy forest pathway is happening, lest the players think this isn’t enough game. Press A. Press A. Press A. In the 11th-century chanson de gest The Song of Roland, at the urging of Oliver and the Archbishop Turpin, Roland presses A to blow his hunting horn to summon the Frankish army to their aid against the Spanish Arabs so hard he has an aneurysm and dies. Even Charlemagne is impressed by his dedication to the gamer spirit. Ex Voto is dedicated to the gamer spirit, alright.
What first piqued my interest in Ex Voto was its promise of an interest in medieval romances, the calamitous and complex history of 14th-century Italy, and tragic lesbians. Next to none of that is on the screen here.
While Aeta will offer some scant commentary on the world around her (being impressed by books, noticing the age of a chapel carved into the side of a mountain, the lingering paganism in the Catholic countryside, the stagnation of wells), most of her journey is walking through those Unreal Engine 5 landscapes, killing peasants and soldiers, and moving blocks. When she finds a set of ruined stairs, rather than climb up the clearly scaffolded side of the cliff, she does block puzzles. When confronted with immovable stone rubble where a pathway should be, Aeta will find the most winding course around. Other times she’ll push carts to climb up. Carts are some of the finest medieval technology. Not even Chrétien de Troyes’s poem Lancelot, The Knight Of The Cart, had this much fucking cart pushing.
But mostly, she just walks through all of this world. Aeta has no engagement, no buy-in; if she has any understanding at all of her society and her place in it, of the history that has swept her up, she displays no indication. The game simply isn’t interested in letting her. 1348 Ex Voto won’t even give its main characters time to talk to one another until the very end. Aeta barely even talks to herself. “Our priest would tell me this tale!” she exclaims in a forest while lifting yet another Saint medal from the mossy ground—a gift for Bianca. But the tale is never forthcoming. When Aeta talks to the player she communicates nothing. Instead there’s a small blurb about the saint in the Treasures tab, tucked alongside the anemic skill progression tab, and the section where Aeta can make instant stat customizations to her sword from scattered parts like it’s the M-LOK tactical rail on an AR-15. Even its climactic final battle, mirroring the opening, where Aeta and Bianca finally have a real conversation, is so contrived and full of forced revelation that it only serves as a moment to rest your thumbs during one last tedious and overlong dueling sequence. The game has as little interest in exploring the rich history of this era or its complexities as it does the questionably queer relationship between Aeta and Bianca. It’s uncomfortable for a critic to think of a game in terms of what it could be, and not what it is. But having what little there is here, I’m left only with the sucking vacuum of this game that could have been more than a tedious medieval combat simulator, if it was more invested in exploring its ideas than being insecure about what a game needs to be.
1348 Ex Voto was developed by Sedleo and published by Dear Villagers. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the PlayStation 5.
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