Suzerain is unlike anything else I've played. You control the president of a fictional country loosely based on an amalgam of 1950s Turkey, Germany, Eastern Europe, and others. You'll deal with overcoming the legacy of your country's recent dictatorship, foreign policy with neighbours of all stripes, navigating the waters between two superpowers modeled on the US and Soviet Union, refugee crises, internal strife between reformers, radicals, and reactionaries, and much more. This'll generally be done through detailed text conversation choices with various people in government. Some are your allies, some are your enemies. You won't always know which.
Why should you be interested? A few reasons:
* The characters are generally well-written. You'll grow to love, hate, respect, or pity them. You'll constantly guess at their real intentions.
* You have lots of divergent directions you can take your country in. This isn't a linear ride to the end. You can make your country great, raise the economy and living standards, win wars against your enemies, and shake off the authoritarian past to become a thriving democracy. You can go full communist or capitalist. You can embrace corruption and work in the shadows, or stand for principle. You can screw up so badly you're impeached, assassinated, or disintegrated in a nuclear apocalypse.
* The developers have an adult's understanding of the world, and they've patterned the game after real-life events, economic trends, and political realities. Generally, the different ideologies are reasonably fleshed-out and not caricatures. The devs are clearly left-leaning but they're generally fair in their evaluation of history, with some unfortunate exceptions.
* The game isn't really a strategy game. It's extremely light on mechanics, heavy on conversational choices and consequences. This makes it easy to learn and a good game for those turned off of dense grand strategy.
* The game has a few problems. The writing quality gets a bit inconsistent later (perhaps due to dev time limitations) and the endgame feels rushed. The devs have a shaky understanding of economics and this becomes evident with that overly-abstracted side of the game. Sometimes the results of your decisions aren't nearly transparent enough (arguably this makes the game more realistic). Still, none of these are deal-breakers.
Anyways, highly recommended! Anyone here played it?
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