Suzerain is basically a role-playing game, in which you play as the president of a newly-republican Turkey-like country during a Cold War-like period. Your job is to lead the country out of its economic, social, and political troubles while dodging coups, wars, scandals, and the breakdown of your family. The game is presented as a series of dialogue choices, each of which, it turns out, has enormous ramifications as the game develops. The true brilliance of the game is in the depth of the world in which you play and the multiplicity of choices available to you. While seemingly simplistic at first, the game begins hinting to you early on that it's paying attention to what you're doing, and it's reacting accordingly. Moreover, it reacts logically, which I really appreciated: if you piss people off, they remember, and they make sure to undermine you or harm you whenever they can; if you help people, they will be willing to help you in return. But then again, what if you help somebody who is already set on working against you? Then you're being naive, and you're a really crap politician! Basically, the game encourages you to really think like a politician, to understand the weaknesses and strengths of those around you, to act ruthlessly when necessary, to be polite to most people, but above all to be consistent, so that people can understand your intentions. In my first playthrough, I got an excellent result for my country, and avoided most of the terrible possible outcomes, simply because I thought logically about my choices and employed policies which, in the real world, are beneficial to the majority of people, while also making sure that people SAW ME being a good president. Downsides? They're few, and minor. The encyclopedia entries appear to be mediocre translations from the original German. While their intent is clear enough, these need a bit of polish. The ending also came a bit suddenly - I really had no idea how long the game was supposed to be.
Apparently this has been a problem since 2015, so get on fixing this GOG.
