How being President made me a better Radical - a review of Suzerain

 

 Over the past week I've been playing Suzerain, a sort of choose your own adventure political simulation game. Released in 2020 by Torpor Games, I totally missed it until browsing a recommended for you tab during a sale. The aim of the game is for the player to take on the mantle of President of the nation of Sordland, a country with a very complex and bleak political history, complete with revolutions, military coups, civil wars and deposed monarchs. The game treats it all very seriously, with many of the people and cultures and organisations being similar but not copies of our own world during the early days of the Cold War. The game is set in 1953 by its own calendar and the technology and development and political situation of the world tally with that.

Once a decision is made you cannot reload and undo it, you'll have to start a whole new game if you really need to change course. The game starts with a profile builder for your character and a timeline of events in Sordland's recent history. Throughout you are given some options to choose from about certain actions and beliefs, this is largely to help the player build a picture of the character Anton Rayne, but some of the options do come up and have some bearing in the game. Eventually the timeline shifts to documenting Anton's rise to the Presidency, and the game proper starts with your inauguration.

The goal is to essentially survive as President and depending on player decisions stay alive until the conclusion of your first (only?) term. At the start you are given some options, economic outlook, pro-market or pro-planned economy, which sector of government to prioritise, defence, health etc. and which of the worlds two superpowers to develop closer ties or to push for a third path.  The prologue is there to give you a rough plan of who you wish to be as a person and a President. I chose to stick to that plan as closely as possible with deviations being forced upon me. I ended the game as partially successful reformer who had been swept up in the CSP, the game's version of the Warsaw Pact.

The game is very gripping, my first play through was over 11 hours which I played over a week. I needed to spread it over several days because otherwise I would've just done nothing but play the game until it ended. The world of Suzerain is full of characters, institutions, nations, cultures, religions, and so on. There is a codex for nearly everything referenced in the game and its information can be useful at certain parts of the game. It took 11 hours to play the game, just reading a file of the codex entries alone will had several more hours. But, you don't need to be overly familiar with the games codex to be successful, its an asset, but not a vital one, you can still complete a play-through with some thought and a strong sense of what you want to achieve.

The music is also a strong point of the game. Most of the games action is through text boxes so the soundtrack had to work hard to deliver on setting appropriate moods. After playing the game I bought the soundtrack and have listened to it quite a bit. The tracks were composed by James Spence and they're fantastic, Suspense the track that often accompanied the stressed and important political meetings made me feel like biting my nails, a habit I broke years ago, and Past which covers more reflective episodes had me looking back on my own life.

 It does allow you scope to play radically differently, I ended the game as a mostly clean democrat who leaned left and had made some ground to support minorities and averted an invasion from a powerful neighbour. Looking at the achievements on Steam, I can see that I could've done the exact opposite, become a brutal and corrupt despot, or overthrown in yet another civil war, and many points in between. And crucially, the developments largely made sense, there were times when bombshells were dropped in my lap, but once the smoke cleared and I learnt more about those events they also made sense. I understood why my opposition, oligarchs, foreign powers, conservatives and nationalists, were out to get me. I didn't particularly sympathise with their views but they had reasons for doing what they were doing. 

Sordland is to put it bluntly a mess. Its been ruled by a military strongman whose shadow still looms over everything, it is technically a democratic state but its constitution was devise with the explicit intention of maintaining strong central authority, and the ruling party the United Sordland Party (USP) has ruled unquestioned since the end of the civil war. You are the current leader of the USP which is both a blessing and a curse. And a failed reformist administration provoked a major economic recession, and there's a powerful and active nationalist movement even more fanatically devoted to the ruling ideology than the USP, violent extremist groups and at least one regional power looking to change the map for good. And that's just on day one. For a text based game that moves from one backroom meeting to the next its surprisingly eventful.

Which brings me to this games most important teaching moment. No matter how strong my mandate or how dirty I fought or how pure my ideals, I could not carry out fundamental change to the system. The best I could do was push through some reforms, and that had to be watered down when I faced intractable opposition. If I kept pushing things to there limit, at best all my reforms would fail, and I would probably be done for, or attacked by a foreign power. The Anarchist criticism of power isn't that bad people can hold power, it is power itself that is the issue. Being President of a nation is not a blank check to do whatever you wish so we just have to make sure the best person gets the top job and all is well. Presidents et al are constrained by other forces and circumstance, compromises have to be made and no matter what the system continues grinding on. And Suzerain teaches this important lesson at every step on the road. 

I promised to expand healthcare during my first term, but we were in the middle of a severe recession inherited from past administrations, and the oligarchs and the ultra conservative political elite had already threatened me repeatedly. So, I expanded funding for the courts and created an anti-corruption force to tackle corruption but also to investigate both factions, healthcare had to make do with what resources it had. Later I was able to find enough money to combat a Polio outbreak and make prescription medicine free, but that put Sordland in debt and hindered the overall economic recovery. This is just one example, it simply isn't possible to achieve everything you promise the electorate. Which is also a lesson we are taught in the real world time after time. Dictator or Democrat, there is not one leader in world history whose legacy doesn't have many stains and broken promises. 

Usually, in political commentary the reaction to this is to lambast the individual leader or their network of advisers. And occasionally the criticism will expand to include the whole political party or coalition and very rarely during the time of political revolution the whole governmental mechanism will be condemned. Its obvious that some senior politicians are actively corrupt or promise well beyond their means to deliver, do I need to cite an example? I'm sure every reader can think of a dozen examples at least and some will be unique to their background. But Suzerain goes further than this, you can be an angel and work beyond the limits to achieve your vision, its a video game after all, even if Anton Rayne gets shot the player will be fine. It just won't be enough, forces outside your control with their own wills, desires and concerns will clash with you, even allied and friendly ones.

I have no idea if this was the intended message of Suzerain's developers Torpor Games. Though I find it difficult to see any other intended message. Especially when attending the games version of the United Nations the AN. The AN meeting is essentially where all of the foreign policy tangles you've tried to smooth out come to ahead. One after another Rayne and his counterparts in the other nations ascend to the podium and give their views, the words and specific goals of each speaker are different but the forms and structure are the same. They each outline their grievances with each other, often at opposite sides of the same tensions, each one is selective in their arguments and uses high talk of ideals to cloak pragmatic demands, and each one has a point. There is no `good guy` there, they all are equally to blame for causing these tensions and are all equally blameless since they are the inheritors and responders to past and current tensions beyond their control. Even your nation Sordland behaves in much the same way, or at least my Sordland did. 

There were dialogue options to stress peace and co-operation, but I just didn't see the point in choosing any of them, it was far too late for any such talk to make a difference. By that point I had a neighbour actively trying to provoke a war with me and building a nuclear weapons program, I had also signed Sordland into the CSP a powerful block of nations and its leader had already started modernising Sordland's military. I had already been pressured into taking a side in regional and global conflict that seemed about to rip open any day. And I had seen no evidence from the other heads of government that neutral appeal would work at all in advancing Sordland's benefit.

I had set out with the goal of staying independent and maintaining peace and treating everyone fairly but the events of the game forced me to make serious compromises on nearly every front. Which is also a testament to the games excellent writing, its a video game, I could've have at any point said `to hell with it` and played how I wished damning the consequences and just booting up a new game when the sword finally dropped on my head. But, I just couldn't play like that, I cared what those close to me felt about me and wanted to collaborate with them. And I actively viewed several characters in contempt and looked forward to arranging their downfall and felt cheated in the cases where I could never catch them. And for the bigger picture I struggled to do the best I could with the limited resources I had while doing my best to keep all those plates spinning.  

This is how I ended up.