From the Archive: Suzerain Review (2021)
"Grinding-up politics with Suzerain"
The following review was originally written in 2021. It is being republished here because I am replaying the game since the recent update and want to be able to compare notes, and to give people some idea of what I’m talking about when I get into that and the Kingdom of Rizia DLC, which will almost definitely be two separate pieces. Anyway, this has been very lightly edited.
It’s been said that two things you don’t want to see get made are sausage and laws. Well, in Suzerain you get to make one of those, and it isn’t sausage. And, moreover, it’s something worth seeing.
Developed by Torpor Games, published by Fellow Traveller and released in December, Suzerain is a text-based RPG that includes components of a turn-based strategy game, a government-management simulator, and a visual novel. It takes systems from different genres and layers them effortlessly. Like many computer games, the main physical input is clicking on the mouse. Nonetheless, it is a rewarding gameplay loop because of the engaging nature of the narratives that you navigate, and the concrete consequences of your actions.
Suzerain is set against the backdrop of the Cold War in an alternate earth. Standing-in for the United States and NATO is the capitalist power Arcasia and ATO. In place of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are United Contana and the Contanan Security Pact. You begin in 1954 as Anton Rayne, newly-elected fourth president of Sordland, a young republic in a region with ages-old rivalries currently thrust onto the stage of world politics between spheres of influence. A revolution thirty years ago preceded a coup, a civil war, a twenty-year presidency, and then a brief succession crisis where the victor’s economic reforms led to a recession your administration is tasked with ending. And so, onto the stage you walk, to bargain trade deals, negotiate the passage of bills, develop infrastructure, and keep an eye on foreign and domestic threats.
As President Rayne, you’ll run up against a lot of detail on current events, history, and your family. To make the best of your term in office, you’ll need to remember what you learn, but if you have any doubts or concerns, there is an in-game wiki that provides you with information about the world around you and the characters you interact with. In each conversation, you can click on the profile pictures that represent other characters to open the codex, as well as highlighted names of people and places. It’s immersive worldbuilding. Though it could be said to be telling rather than showing, it makes sense being contextualized as background research. There are also intelligence reports and internal briefings to inform your decisions and reports from newspapers with varying biases to see the popular – and corporate – responses to your actions. And all the information about the welfare of the country, the diplomatic situation, and the state of the police and military are at your fingertips as well. Meanwhile, there are somewhere around 400,000 words of dialogue and scenario writing between all the branching paths. Even without dedicated voice acting, I felt like each character had their own voice.
Each cabinet member has their own wants, needs, and senses of loyalty to President Rayne, the party, or the country. Maybe your VP is a drunken womanizer. Perhaps your Minister of Defense and Army Chief of Staff have different ideas about professionalizing the army, but both want budget increases. Your Minister of Economy wants privatization but will execute any plan to the best of his ability. Some of your other ministers might jockey with each other for position. Your Minister of Justice and Interior have different ideas on how to maintain peace and order, but they draw from the same budget.
The oligarchs threatening to leave the nation will do just that if things get too hot – my amazing economic development had the rug pulled out from under it completely – and the party hardliners in your cabinet will abandon you in time for the new election (my Minister of the Interior won the party’s candidacy). There is also an alleged deep state, The Old Guard, said to have been placed in positions of power like the Supreme Court to maintain the old way. You are walking through a metaphorical political minefield and, if you’re not careful, possibly a literal one.
One thing I love about Suzerain is that the right and wrong answers are seldom obvious. It requires long-term strategic thinking and sticking to your guns. My first attempt at democratic socialism failed – our economy plummeted from recession into depression and I wasn’t granted a second term. I think I gave up the wrong things when revising the Constitution. Though I refused to take or give bribes, I got caught in two thoughtless scandals: definitely pulled some strings to get my kid into school after he failed his exams (I was afraid he’d be murdered at war if I let him go to the military before I ended conscription, which happened later), I got caught donating to the young communist group (I needed help with my election). I’m fairly certain I misread at least one bill I signed, and even though I got through the reform to remove immunity for former presidents, the attempt to prosecute our founding dictator failed. My biggest flaw, without a doubt, is that I softened toward conservative demands later in my run, and sometimes tried to stake out a moderate path that neutered the changes I wanted, even as my statements in the international assembly and toward my foreign minister secured my reputation as a Malenyevist (Suzerain’s stand-in for Marxist-Leninist).
I want to try soft-touch leftism again, before I make runs at communist dictatorship and neoliberalism. There are guides and forums and a subreddit that can tell you how to get each desired result, but I am trying to resist finding all the info on the web, as much as I could use some pointers. Suzerain is fun and I want to explore it myself. I wandered briefly onto one guide and discovered there were options for failure that I had not considered. I feel like I’ve spoiled enough, but you should know that warfare is not off the table. Nothing your advisors, political rivals, or foreign powers bring up in conversation is said just for show. All threats and warnings have teeth. Most the good or bad results you could imagine for a world leader – with recent and distant history as precedent – are possible.
Even if my President Rayne was ousted by his party, he had his successes. Our administration brought equal education and employment opportunities to the women of the country. We expanded health care and education into rural areas. We connected them to the major economic centers with a major highway project. Our vaccine program prevented a polio epidemic and our alliances prevented a war against an expansionist monarchical neighbor. We put a new Constitution through that expanded democracy and checked executive and judicial power. Sordland couldn’t maintain a nonaligned stance, but we’ll give it another shot in the future.
Suzerain runs somewhere in the realm of 15 hours, so you can get your first playthrough in a weekend. I don’t know how anyone could avoid playing it more than once.
One bold creative decision by the team at Torpor Games was to remove manual loading and saving. You get one save file, like old-school Pokémon. It autosaves after certain actions, though you can load from checkpoints. I did sort of wish I could have concurrent stories going to try to work different actions out, but this feature removes that failsafe and makes you wander into the murky waters yourself. Even Crusader Kings allows save-scumming outside of Ironman mode. No such luck here. Deliberate on your choices, for they are set in stone (though, as a politician, you are free to make promises you don’t intend to keep). The moral and ethical quandaries, the gray areas and conflicts of interest; all this is established in the writing, and it makes the experience of Suzerain seem weighty and deep even as it is paced in a way that allows you to run through it, alluring in a way that makes you want to keep at it.
Suzerain is an excellent game because of all the emotions it made me feel over my run. This experience is augmented by a mostly mellow instrumental soundtrack that ebbs and flows with the mounting tensions of climactic moments like world political summits and internal crises. I felt triumphant when I had brought my economy out of the red and into the green while keeping my planned economy promise to the people who elected me. I felt mounting worry as my government dipped deep into the red with enemies at the gates. I felt confounded in interviews – both those planned and spontaneous. It’s a great game to test your personal dedication to your principles, or to experiment with those you’ve only heard about. Or to do what I sometimes do in RPGs and oscillate between the poles to see what outcomes you get.
What it felt like was that I learned things about myself, about where I am willing to compromise and where I should not be. I enjoyed the game so much that I wanted to tell you all about it and so I raced through it; perhaps I would have made better choices if I looked at my dialogue options more like the game of four-dimensional chess they represent. At least a few times, I wish I had stuck with my guns. I love a piece of entertainment that makes you think, a piece of art that invites its audience to critique themselves and their world view. Suzerain has some cool Let’s Play videos on YouTube, as at least a few historian-gamers experiment with their ideas and explain some of what the game is representing. Broadly speaking, I can tell you that the game’s setting draws inspiration in events and geography from Eastern Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Some in the fanbase point to Turkey and Romania as the most obvious inspirations, with poet-politician Bernard Circas based on real-life Turkish romantic communist Nazim Hikmet. There are oppressed minorities living in borderlands between states, reformists and traditionalists across different countries, and trouble around every corner.
It would be nice to see more of the world, of the other continents beyond Merkopa like Rika and Xina. It would be cool if you could play as the Bludish minority or as a woman president, though perhaps those options will be added in further expansions or a sequel. I really found very little wrong with the game. The soundtrack was just okay. I might need to play more to pick at it. I will say that it’s not action-packed in a traditional way. If you prefer RTS games or being a warmonger in Civilization, this might not be your cup of tea. If the only thing you’ve ever played is shooters and sports games, Suzerain will likely throw you for a loop. That isn’t to say you won’t like it, but it’s very much a text-based RPG. I feel like a review without criticism is basically an advertisement, so all I can really stress is that the music didn’t floor me and that this is a very particular kind of game. It isn’t so convoluted in its difficulty that people new to RPGs will be completely lost, but it doesn’t have the relative sandbox nature of a grand strategy game like Civilization or an RPG/grand strategy game like Crusader Kings either. The gameplay could stand to be more varied – the three main resources you have on display are the strength of your economy, your federal budget, and your personal wealth. In my mind, it was sufficient for what was presented to me. And I anticipate Torpor Games dreaming bigger in the future.
I will say, if you’re living in a country whose state is failing it, while the rich get richer as the poor die preventable deaths, Suzerain is an ample opportunity to dream, to prognosticate, to hypothesize how you would handle and prevent crises. Maybe you’re just a political junkie or armchair historian. Maybe you just like strategy games and want to see something more modern or less militaristic than the most prominent offerings. Maybe you just want to try a different kind of RPG with consequences to your decisions.
And where do you stand on the political compass grid? Maybe you’re a staunch proponent of economic liberalism or you believe in state control. Given the choice between prosperity and equality, what do you choose? What about realpolitik or idealism? Suzerain is a worthwhile experience because it asks you those questions, and makes you ask more of yourself. It’s a good game because it manages to do so while also being amusing and entertaining. Suzerain draws fun from some of the best and worst parts of pics.
It’s only $15 on Steam or GOG (you can also get the $10 soundtrack as a packaged deal for $22 on Steam). The game only takes up 2GB of HD/SSD space and requires just 4GB of RAM to run. It doesn’t require a hardcore processor or graphics card, and can run as far back as Windows 7. I ran a test on my computer that said it wouldn’t work, and then I played through without a single crash or slowdown. If you couldn’t tell, I think Suzerain is a worthwhile investment.