Developed/Published by: Popcannibal
Released: 07/03/25
Completed: 10/07/25
Completion: Completed it.

I was looking for something quick to play through and I saw that I’d noted that this recently (re-)released adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac was under an hour, so I decided to give it a run through.

The most interesting way to think about Cyrano is that it feels like one of those “abridged” books for children–it’s a gentle, extremely pleasant introduction to one of the classics. The likelihood is that while you’re familiar with the concept (poetic man with large nose helps attractive thicko woo the woman he secretly loves) and you probably know one famous scene from many, many parodies (the one where Cyrano feeds Christian lines to charm Roxanne) you probably don’t know anything else about the story or setting–and Cyrano provides the broad strokes in charming fashion.

While you get to enjoy the story, the majority of your interaction comes from JRPG-style battles and “letter writing” and the way these two sections connect is really fun and interesting, even if they’re individually a touch simplistic. The JRPG battles are so simple, in fact, they tend towards unbalanced. You can’t choose which enemy to hit and healing is weak, meaning it’s more luck than tactics. But each enemy defeated gives you a playing card, and each playing card has (most of) a line of poetry on it, so when time comes for Cyrano to write Roxanne a letter, you make the best poker hand you can from the cards you have managed to collect, and then those cards form the basis of the letter, upon which you can type your own flourishes for fun.

I genuinely think this is quite a brilliant concept and I couldn’t help but wish that perhaps the game was longer and the mechanics given more space to flesh out–get crunchier, more tactical. You can’t, for example, roam around to get into more battles and get new cards. There are no upgrades to cards or gear or whatever. This is completely fine for something of this length, but it’s a mechanic ripe for exploration if anyone wants to.

Something also worth mentioning about the letter writing: Cyrano was originally released in 2021 as part of a pack to support LudoNarraCon, and this new version’s main addition is to add controller support–allowing this to, for example, be played on Steam Deck. But because the game features you adding your own text to letters, you need to at least be using a soft keyboard, which as we all know, sucks. You can just skip this aspect completely as it has no mechanical effect, but it does mean you’re not taking part in a fun aspect of the game that personalises it for you (at the end it shows you all the letters you wrote) so that’s kind of a bummer. It would have been nice if there was a “I don’t want to type” version that just filled out the whole sentences on the cards for you–even if it would be less funny.

I’m quibbling, however. Cyrano is a good example of how much work a strong narrative and a breezy runtime can do for a game–especially when paired with lovely, appropriate art. You do feel like you’re enjoying a play, and at the end I found myself rather moved–Cyrano is a classic for a reason.

Will I ever play it again? It’s not going to play out any differently. But it does make me fancy watching another adaptation. Maybe that Steve Martin one???

Final Thought: The most surprising thing about Cyrano is that it doesn’t feature the most famous scene! I thought it might feature it still using the poker-hand letter writing mechanic, but it’s excised. In fact, the version of the story here shuffles about and changes things more than I expected–all the more reason to revisit the story elsewhere.