In October 2025, a woman clad in traditional Chinese attire started taking over gaming YouTube channels. Wearing extravagant accessories and staring intensely from the screen, she captivated viewers as gaming YouTubers rushed to talk about her using exciting phrases like “immersive,” “court intrigue,” and “sunfish”—a term meaning an extremely fragile or sensitive character that spread among gamers after the rising popularity of the mobile game “Survive! Mola Mola!,” where the namesake sunfish, or mola mola, dies constantly for almost no reason.
The woman on the screen was the main character of a game called “Road to Empress,” inspired by China’s only empress in history, Wu Zetian (also known as Wu Meiniang). Players step into the character’s shoes and choose their own adventure through over 100 branching storylines, sharing in the adversity she faces on her journey to becoming empress.
Gamifying short-form dramas
Though they might be unfamiliar to some gamers, Chinese period dramas have been rising to international popularity for quite some time now. Beginning in the late 2010s, series like “Eternal Love,” “Story of Yanxi Palace,” and “The Untamed” found fans all across Asia with their high-quality costumes and solid stories, paving the way for the C-drama movement alongside modern romances like “Love O2O” and “A Love So Beautiful.” Also worth noting is their recent surge in popularity in Korea. According to the Korea Creative Content Agency, more than 800 Chinese dramas were available on streaming platforms TVING, Wavve, and WATCHA as of the first half of the year—double the number from three years ago—and C-dramas have also made up more than half of the viewing figures for foreign shows on Wavve. The court intrigue of “Road to Empress,” then, is clearly a natural extension of the craze.
Not only is “Road to Empress” part of the C-drama trend, but it’s also closely aligned with the rising trend for short dramas. In recent years, the media industry has been increasingly shifting toward catering to shorter attention spans through TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and the like. This includes everything from condensing typical hour-long movies and dramas down to roughly 10 minutes to creating entirely new short dramas from scratch. Short dramas, which fall under the latter category, generally consist of 50 to 100 episodes that are one to 10 minutes long each. These shows specialize in capturing an entire story within a short timeframe while ramping up excitement for the next episode.
“Road to Empress” adopts a similar approach. The game branches off into numerous small segments, with most consisting of video clips lasting about three to five minutes, and the longest topping out around 10. Each of them gets directly to the point, showing the player what they need to know to make a snap decision. The gaming part of the experience isn’t a demanding one and doesn’t require great dexterity. Rather, it’s there to enrich the video drama, and they work together seamlessly. This includes simple interactive elements right in the video, like when the protagonist has to escape some situation to impart a sense of urgency in the player, or as an outlet for welled-up emotions. Meanwhile, the choices players make between videos fuel their curiosity surrounding potential outcomes, much like your classic cliffhanger in a more traditional series.
The game inherits something else from TV dramas when it comes to the relationship between the player and the main character. Unlike how players usually identify directly with the protagonist in other games, in “Road to Empress,” the player follows the character’s journey from more of a distance. It’s this aspect of observation rather than immersion that takes the conventions of gaming and frames them in the short drama format.
A lighthearted gaming experience
The story of “Road to Empress” unfolds as a nonlinear narrative according to the player’s choices. (In games designed in this fashion, player decision and action directly affect the direction and final outcome of the story. Unlike in standard linear storytelling, each timely choice creates a new path, and this branching structure leads to multiple endings.) And where players typically expect nonlinear narratives to lead to drastically different storylines depending on their choices, the branches in this game feel more like a web of wrong decisions. Nearly every decision waiting to be made has one correct choice, and venturing down the wrong path leads to so-called bad endings like exile or death. Although there are “sub-endings” where the protagonist forges a future for herself that doesn’t involve the throne, these paths spell the end of the line for the story, so they don’t even feel like endings in the truest sense. Considering that, the game doesn’t really play with different narrative possibilities. It’s really more of a guessing game where players are tasked with uncovering the one true path—in other words, a matter of trial and error where you repeatedly fail until you eventually circle in on the canonical decision. In fact, once you finally reach the true ending, you’re shown how successful you were on first clearing the game to the end, along with how you stack up against other players. Those stats are more or less a measure of how well a player was able to guess the correct answers along the way. In other words, the game tests them on their strategies and cunning when faced with surviving intense court intrigue.
One notable aspect of the game is that it's a remarkably low-stakes, stress-free affair. Granted, the protagonist is so frail that she’s been called a sunfish, with the slightest miscalculation in the decision tree leading directly to death at times—most players don’t make it past the palace gates alive, and repeatedly face death by poisoning. And yet the game is hardly fatiguing thanks to the extremely lightweight consequences. First, “Road to Empress” imposes almost no penalties for messing up. Even when players come up against a bad ending, they can jump to a nearby branch and resume the game right away. Each video is incredibly short, and players can fast-forward or skip them entirely, allowing players to make decisions untethered and without hesitation. Another way the game alleviates stress is in the way it frames choices as a reflection of the player’s personality, analyzing their decision-making style and providing its findings in a report. The assessment lets players see any wrong turn as an outcome shaped by their personality rather than as failures.
Apart but playing together
“Road to Empress” features a unique monetization model: an economy of flowers and eggs. These purchases aren’t about unlocking content—players can buy the two items from the in-game shop and use them to express approval or disapproval through a voting system. If you grow to like a character while playing, you can send them flowers. If, on the other hand, you grow to despise them, you can throw eggs at them. This not only gives players an outlet but also allows them to share their views with others. You input your nickname, choose the number of flowers to send or eggs to lob, and it all goes on the record for a running tally to rank the characters from most loved to most loathed, instilling a sense of shared experience. By observing the feelings of the entire community, players find common ground, which fosters a sense of belonging.
The birth of short form in game form
Ultimately, “Road to Empress” blurs the boundaries between games and short-form video, introducing a new way to engage with narratives. The game goes beyond merely stringing together short videos, too. By incorporating familiar aspects of gaming like clicking, decision-making, and trial and error, it invites participation that it then seamlessly weaves into the story itself. That transition—from passive consumption to active experience, from “watching” to “playing”—represents a leap forward in the idea of just what short-form content can be. In other words, “Road to Empress” is more than just a short game. It shows us one potential direction short-form content can take—one that’s interactive, immersive, and gamified. Short-form is about more than brevity—it’s about creating an intensely engaging experience within that limited timeframe. And “Road to Empress” might just be the bellwether of a rising new variety of short-form, gamified.