Road to Empress Is the FMV Drama Game to Watch This Year

New One Studio, the team behind The Invisible Guardian, is back with another cinematic experience—Road to Empress. It’s an interactive full-motion video game focused on Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in Chinese history. The game is launching soon on Steam, iOS, and Android, and it already feels like one of the year’s most visually ambitious narrative titles.

Filmed entirely in 4K Ultra HD, Road to Empress uses a combination of real actors, branching decisions, and sharp time-based gameplay to put players right in the middle of Tang dynasty palace politics. You’ll play as Wu Zetian, starting from her lowly role in the imperial court, climbing through love, betrayal, and cold political ambition to reach the throne.

“There are over 100 ways to die,” the devs say.

This isn’t a slow drama—it’s a survival game disguised as historical fiction. The choices aren’t just moral or aesthetic. They’re strategic. Misjudge a conversation, trust the wrong courtier, or fall for the wrong person, and it’s game over. Quick thinking and instinct carry real weight.

The production comes with a real storytelling pedigree. Demi Guan, a BAFTA-winning producer, returns after her success on The Invisible Guardian, a 2017 hit that redefined FMV storytelling in the Chinese indie scene. That game earned acclaim for fusing localized culture with global storytelling mechanics, and Road to Empress is clearly trying to push that even further. The new title mixes documentary-level detail with fictional dramatization. It was developed in close consultation with Chinese historians and cultural scholars, and it shows in everything from the language options to the costume design.

The narrative choices don’t just change plotlines—they also build out a psychological profile for the player. This system was co-developed with Beijing Normal University and is designed to reflect how you think, react, and strategize under pressure. Whether that translates into meaningful reflection or just clever replay value depends on how deep it really goes, but the ambition is clear.

Context-wise, Road to Empress comes during a surge of FMV and narrative-based games hitting the market in Asia and beyond. Since 2023, titles like Death Come True, The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story, and Twelve Minutes have expanded what players expect from story-first gameplay. Compared to its competitors, Road to Empress is leaning harder into historical fiction and traditional drama, almost like a prestige TV series blended with interactive structure.

It also arrives just weeks after the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 trailer went viral for its unique visual style and ambitious, painterly storytelling. While Clair Obscur is a stylized RPG with French surrealist influences, both games are part of the same wider trend—cinematic world-building that prioritizes aesthetics, narrative mood, and player choice over genre conventions.

While there’s no exact date yet, Road to Empress is already available to wishlist on Steam and open for pre-registration on the App Store and Google Play. It supports multiple subtitles and menu languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. That kind of localization support suggests New One Studio is aiming for international visibility.

As for gameplay length or structure, the team hasn’t revealed full details, but if The Invisible Guardian is anything to go by, expect a multi-episode format or something close to a Netflix binge experience. The FMV format makes that model feel natural, and the high-stakes court narrative gives it structure—every episode could be a political cliffhanger.

Road to Empress isn’t just selling a story. It’s selling immersion into one of history’s most dangerous royal courts, through the eyes of a woman rewriting the rules of power. That makes it a strong candidate not only for the FMV crowd but for anyone following the growing space where interactive media meets historical fiction.