Suzerain

"Suzerain" casts the player as the newly-elected President of a country emerging from years of turmoil after the reigns of two very different Presidents. The game is fictionalized, freeing the creators to make their own history and figureheads, but there are very clear parallels with the real-world situation in the mid-fifties, with yours as a medium-sized European country often dealing with regional rivalries and the machinations of world superpowers. Most of the choices the player makes in the game are simple multiple choice responses to dialogues, with a few binary choices (like whether to sign or veto a bill) and a few sliders (how much to privatize or maintain state control over particular companies). Despite the lack of fine, micro-control, the writing, strongly portrayed characters, and tense decisions all help to give the player a sense of weight (and sometimes the accompanying dread), even with such simple questions as how to greet a world leader or address your son's smoking. It warrants praise that the game appears to offer some way through via a variety of political tactics, whether one wants to be a liberal reformer or a hard-line near-dictator. What the game does not, in my limited play-through, seem to appreciate is half-measures. You may not be tripped up by every mistake, but fail to keep your promises, to individuals or to the country, and people will remember. If I were to cite one significant flaw, it's the way budget is handled. Predictably, large deficits are not a good thing, and there's never enough budget for all you might want to do. But the game does a poor job of giving you a sense when new expenditures will emerge, and even less when financial policies might see results or windfalls come through; two unannounced late-emerging bills that occurred in a single turn seemed to have more of an effect on the hard numbers than long-term infrastructure choices. Fascinating and a little draining (like a real presidency), Suzerain has my vote.

I enjoyed this game and finished it. I was eventually overthrown by a coup and jailed. But ended up spending my retirement years in the country with my doting family. Not unlike my own life. The degree of political knowledge displayed by the writers is very detailed and if you don't mind spending a lot of time reading up on the various states and personalities, you can have a good time with it. Don't get this game if you don't like reading but be reassured that the reading time is worth it. It is intriguing and just a little unsettling when you realize that a lot of the goings-on in this fictional country ring quite true. I gave it a 4 rating because I did find that a some of the decisions you make often seem to have the opposite effect later on. But not often enough to make it annoying. I say, give it a try.

I play video games since early 90s. Suzerain would be easily in my top 10 video gaming experiences. It's a trully RPG game, where you really get into your character and all your decisions matter (there is a mandatory autosave, what makes you think twice about what to do). As a newly elected president you need to take care of economy, other parties demands, a division in your own, ethinc minority problem, healthcare and education reforms, international relations with countries that have interest conflicts with themselves and many, many more things. Add to that all the members of your cabinet with different ideas often arguing about them, the military still influenced by Colonel Soil the ex-president, oligarchs trying to make business with you, a threat of military conflict and on top of that there is your family, which you have so little time for. Unique and excellent game, showing a lot of effort of the designers to create such a deep and rich in-game reality.

The game has decent writing (not nearly Disco Elysium levels but it's competent), and your choices really do matter quite a lot when playing. There is probably a huge amount of variety to achieve in any individual playthrough, and the game should be praised for that. Maybe it's just because I've actually taken classes in economics and am at least somewhat knowledgeable about national budgets, but honestly, neither make any sense in this game to the point where it really impacted my experience. For starters, the budget. It just doesn't make sense. Modernizing the air force? That's 1 budget. Passing education reform? Also 1 budget. Implementing a sort of bill of rights? 2 budget. Okay, I get that it's an abstraction, and certain streamlines must be made, but seriously? Are we giving every politician a fighter jet to pass these things? Why do internal reforms cost as much as major infrastructure projects? Also, the economy. Apparently, investing in military equipment and infrastructure brings almost no benefit to the economy. Unless you're conscripting people to reduce unemployment. Thaaaat's fine. At the end of the game I was straight up told "production has doubled, but GDP and dropped by half." Do they know what GDP is? It makes no sense and kind of ruined the experience for me.

I found this game frustrating and unpleasant to play. This is a game based on text, but the prose style is clumsy and littered with unnatural constructions. I gather that it was originally written in German, so the issue is probably one of translation; but while I can see *why* it must be hard to translate this kind of game, that doesn't make the writing any better. I usually like text-based games (hell, Cultist Simulator and King of Dragon Pass are all-time favourites); but for this one I soon stopped reading the dozens of little reports the game gives you, and frequently found myself just zoning out during meetings, almost entirely because I found the writing style so graceless. The prose is simply *ugly,* and it turned me off the game in the way that an grating soundtrack or bad visual aesthetics would turn off a person sensitive to those things. The central resource you have to manage (after the 'economy') is your budget. However, you have no idea--not even a rough, 'maybe this much if there are no crises' kind of an idea--of how many meetings and decisions you will have before the next budget, or how many of them will ask for an expenditure of the budget, or how much of it they will require. Each year, you have a 'budget meeting', and the first time I went into this I I took it to be, well, the budget: I balanced it, spending what I had and expecting the ministries to use it. The very next decision, I'm asked to pass a law which costs 1 budget resource. So why wasn't that mentioned in the meeting, that i just had, that was all about deciding the budget? This persistent lack of information means that I experienced the managment of my main resource resource as a matter of luck and guesswork rather than planning and strategy. This game is in a genre and format that I usually like, and from what I'd heard about it I was expecting to enjoy it, but I couldn't get past the above hurdles. I'll come back to it if I ever learn German.