Suzerain Does the Most Terrifying Thing: Elects You the Leader

Politics seeps into every facet of our lives, whether we like it or not. Video games are often an escape from the real world for many gamers, so you wouldn’t expect politics to feature in this form of entertainment, but it has been important in simulation games for a long time. In 1985, when the Cold War still spread its icy grip around the world, the game Balance of Power became a big hit because it replicated the American and Soviet nuclear standoff.

These cerebral political simulation games decreased in popularity by the late 1990s, though. Only a couple of years ago, the Berlin-based studio Torpor Games bucked the trend when they released their political simulation game, Suzerain. So, dust off those brain cells, because Suzerain wants to challenge us to think again about our political world.

A Seat at The Table

It can not be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. Alexis de Tocqueville

Those words of the French philosopher who had visited America in the early 19th century circulated in my mind while I peered at the devastated world of Suzerain. Sordland, the country you control in the game, had been pummeled by civil war and corruption, which only ended when a military officer, Tarquin Soll, took power after he had defeated his opponents. Suppression of freedom then crystallized into the price for a semblance of stability.

After decades at the helm, Soll stepped back from political life. A new crop of Sordish politicians looked to make a mark. International superpowers saw the country as a battlefield for their ideas, though, at a potentially devastating price for its citizens. Everything is on a knife's edge.

We see the events through the eyes of Anton Rayne, a man whose background we shape in the game’s prologue. There’s also a fair bit of aesthetic customization we can do to change Rayne’s look. From the outset, it becomes clear that this isn’t a typical strategy or simulation game, wherein players are faceless movers of pieces on a board; rather, this is a world full of people.

Laws That Drip from a Pen 

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.   Noam Chomsky

The prologue ends when Rayne wins the 1953 elections. Your feelings of joy are short-lived because Sordland has been battling an economic recession for a couple of years already, and people look to you to save the country from the brink. It can’t be too challenging, right?

Sometimes, a strategy game can feel like a second job, because all the units or people you command transform into a vast ocean of numbers on a screen. Suzerain seeks to remedy this problem by marrying the political simulation aspect with the narrative strengths of visual novels. Each decision thus becomes more of a dilemma because you’ve interacted with the characters and know their names, backgrounds, and sometimes even their deepest fears.

You only have to delve into the codex to see how much ink the writers spilled making Suzerain’s alternate universe a vast, breathing place. Newspapers with different political leanings also react to all your decisions during each turn. The agonizing decisions you encounter make the public scrutiny feel even more brutal.

There’s no time to cower, though, because the people elected you to give Sordland a prosperous future. What that future looks like depends on you; the game gives you a variety of ways to approach a problem, each with its own negatives and positives, but you will have to live with the consequences. Each member of your cabinet also has different agendas and political biases, so you burn bridges with some and mend fences with others.  

A Hesitant Stride

It depends on the habit of attending to and looking into public transactions, and on the degree of information and solid judgment respecting them that exists in the community, whether the conduct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards others, shall be selfish, corrupt, and tyrannical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble. -  John Stuart Mill

Playing Suzerain sapped my emotions like few other experiences - in a good way, I think. For all the agonizing about my decisions, my Anton Rayne met a ghastly end. There was no way for me to redo my mistakes either because you only unlock the manual save function after you have finished the campaign once. There are apparently 9 different main endings, with various permutations creating various experiences, like where your choices land you on the political compass.

My decisions told me a lot about myself. The game is, in a sense, also a political personality test. Like a parent returning home after a long vacation, only to find their home trashed after several parties, you confront the choices of your predecessors, even though you didn’t make those decisions. The game puts you in a vise, giving you only a limited amount of funds, so you need to choose your battles with care. I focused on the issues that really mattered to me, which guided my policies.

Suzerain isn’t as granular as many other simulation games. This means you’re less likely to juggle different spreadsheets to choose an outcome, but it also means that it becomes difficult to track your resources. For example, you might want to fund an expensive dam project, but you're uncertain about what other projects might crop up in the future or whether your income will increase or decrease. This is less of an issue during a replay, though, when you have the benefit of hindsight.  

 Decisions on a Scale

Beware then, my friends, of suffering the heart to be moved by every trivial incident; the reed is shaken by a breeze, and annually dies, but the oak stands firm, and for ages braves the storm -  Mary Wollstonecraft

An enthusiastic fan community has gathered around Suzerain over the last few years, and the game's subreddit is still vibrant. Torpor Games regularly interacts with its community and has worked hard to support the game with significant updates, as the recent 3.1 update further refines the player experience. The developers released a DLC game, Suzerain: Kingdom of Rizia, in 2024, which is an expansion with enough content to warrant its own article. Torpor Games is also working on an RPG set in the Suzerain universe, called The Conformist.

Because the games take place in a rich fictional universe, the writers can explore topics that might have been touchy in other settings. Players can also project their own experiences onto the fictional events that draw from various influences. One of the developer’s greatest achievements is having created so many characters that are complex, dastardly, and believable.

Just like in real-life politics, chasing power in Suzerain can bring out the worst or best in all of us.