Vanity Fair: The Pursuit

I have a spreadsheet tracking decision trees in narrative games, and Vanity Fair: The Pursuit gave it a genuine workout. This is a live-action FMV title rooted firmly in Chinese crime drama, set across a fictionalized 2004-to-2024 entertainment industry backdrop, and it commits to the bit harder than most of its genre peers. You step into the shoes of Lu Yuan, a failed film director who signs on with what looks like a well-connected production house and turns out to be a crime family front. From that single contractual mistake, the game opens into a dense web of chapters spanning roughly fifteen years of fallout. The scenario that drives everything is revenge. A close friend is killed, the culprit walks free, and climbing the organization's hierarchy is the only lever available to you. That framing keeps the stakes legible across the branching structure, and it stops the game from feeling like a random choice simulator. Reviewers with high playtime consistently noted that divergent paths here feel genuinely different rather than cosmetically separate, which is the key quality bar for any FMV worth replaying. The game reportedly ships over a dozen distinct endings, and community feedback suggests the "wrong" paths often resolve into quiet, low-key conclusions rather than punishing death screens. Choosing to step away from the pursuit early and settle for a simpler life is treated as a valid outcome, which is a mature design call. On the mechanical side, managing character affection levels across the three main female characters determines which paths stay open, meaning some routes require backtracking to earlier chapters if your relationship stats are not high enough. That is not elegant design. Combined with the fact that certain branching points appear to be intentionally opaque rather than logically signposted, completionists should budget more time for a second and third run than a single playtime would suggest. One dedicated reviewer clocked roughly 3.6 hours on a first run and close to four more hours to uncover nearly all scenes, which gives a useful time estimate. Total runtime sits in the seven-to-eight hour range for thorough players, which is modest but acceptable for the sub-five tier price point. Production quality is uneven in ways worth flagging. The video is shot in a third-person style with Lu Yuan on screen for most scenes, which grounds the drama more than first-person FMVs typically manage. The cast itself draws positive notes across reviews, with individual performances described as genuinely committed. The drawbacks are production-level: all audio is dubbed rather than synced live, and the English localization carries the usual problems of rushed translation work, including text overflow and gender pronoun inconsistencies. If you are comfortable reading imperfect subtitles or have any familiarity with Chinese-language dramas, this will not derail the experience. If localization quality is a hard requirement, the friction is real. For the FMV audience specifically, this is a title worth attention. It sits closer to crime serial than romance sim, which differentiates it from the genre's crowded dating-focused catalog. The decision design earns its branching label rather than just claiming it. The translation and audio production drag it below what the underlying story deserves, and the affection-gating on certain paths rewards guide-use more than intuition. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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