I’ve decided to start a new little mini-series here where I talk about games that I really love and try to explain why they work for me and (maybe) give some attention to titles that I think deserve more love.

One of these is definitely Suzerain which is by no means unknown but, I feel, is probably more niche. So what is this game and why do I love it?

Suzerain is a 2020 political simulator from German publisher Torpor Games, available on Nintendo Switch, Mac, Android, iOS and Windows. You play Anton Rayne, the fourth president of the fictional nation of Sordland in the equally fictional continent of Merkopa. After a choose-your-own-way recounting of your early life which functions as a character creation session you get to choose Anton’s socio-economic and political background. The game takes you from his election to president to the end of his first term, with you facing various political crises and scandals while you try to shape the country to your own political ideology.

Suzerain teaches you very, very quickly that politics is hard, messy and often deeply morally compromised. On my first play through I just tried to rule according to my conscience, funding health and education, avoiding military conflicts, pouring money into welfare, trying to reform the constitution and advancing the rights of women and ethnic minorities.

President Rayne’s first term ended with him strapped into an electric chair and the bastards didn’t even wet the sponge.

That said, the lesson is not that you should just give up. It’s that you need to be smarter, make compromises, be occasionally ruthless and make peace with the fact that you can feel good about yourself or help the country, but rarely both at the same time.

The game’s other great strength is in its world-building. Every country, political party and individual has a rich and detailed backstory and the game balances being different enough from our own world while still being recognisable enough for us to relate to. For example, you will frequently hear the word “communism” but never “Marxism” or “Leninism” because while communism arose in this world, neither Marx or Lenin existed.

Some nations and institutions in the game have close paralells to our own world. Arcasia is a capitalist superpower and the founding member of the military alliance A.T.O. which stands in opposition to the communist superpower United Contana. All pretty straightforward, and if you just want to think of them as the own-brand USA, Nato and USSR that’s a perfectly decent schema for understanding them and their relationships. But, dig into their history and you will find many ways in which they differ from their real world counterparts. Complicating matters is G.R.A.C.E., a third superpower that espouses neither capitalism or communism but monarchy, which is a fascinating addition.

Sordland itself, while bearing some obvious similarities to real world Turkey, feels like a real, unique nation and has its own native political doctrine; Sollism, a socially conservative but economically progressive politics propounded by the nation’s former quasi-dictator who you can choose to embrace or try to break free of.

This makes for a political universe that busts open simple left-right binaries and chooses nuance and complexity over pat, reassuring answers, aided by a fantastic cast of rich characters who refuse to conform to simple stereotype. Your defence minister might be a xenophobic bully, but he’ll be defending your family with a gun in each hand if an enemy army takes the capital. You may agree with your education minister on just about every point, but find her so personally obnoxious you almost want her to fail out of pure spite.

Be warned, this is a game you play with the novel-reading part of your brain. Most of the time your screen will look like this:

This is a densely text heavy game, with the total word count being greater than Lord of the Rings. Now, that’s not to say that you need to read all of it (and, indeed, it’s impossible to do so on any one given playthrough) but be warned, this game will expect you to pay attention.

If you do though? Suzerain’s modest, text heavy visuals can offer some of the greatest emotional highs and lows I have ever experienced in gaming. Watching your constitutional amendment go down because you lost by one vote? Heartbreaking. Soul destroying.

On the other hand, on one play-through I ran as a staunchly pro-Blud president (the Bluds being an ethnic minority who’ve been having a pretty shitty time for most of Sordland’s history). I vetoed every piece of anti-Blud legislation, I granted them greater autonomy, I protected them from the absolute racist dickhole governor who’d been running their region and I was bleeding votes because of it.

But then I call my teenage son and he tells me he has a girlfriend (my in game son I mean, my actual son is more into dinosaurs than girls) and he says that she’s Bludish.

“Oh, and her family? They love you.”

And, I swear to God, I had a grin on my face for the rest of the day.