izigame.me

Suzerain is an interesting attempt to model domestic, and to much lesser extent international, politics in a non-aligned European state during the Cold War. I want to like it, and I do not regret buying it, but it is an exceptionally frustrating game and this recommendation comes with serious caveats.
To start with, the game has a lot of good points. The characters are interesting. The writing is good. There are several moments of genuine drama and emotion, and for the first 80% of my game I enjoyed the edge-of-my-seat feeling. I like the map layout and the codex provides easy access to information, including a search bar. The soundtrack is excellent, and manages to be somehow simultaneously pleasant and tense, without being intrusive. The price, particularly on sale, is extremely reasonable.
But.
The lack of clear and consistent advice almost single-handedly ruins the experience. Too much information is too obscure to make playing the game feel like much other than a crapshoot for at least the first few attempts. My advisors sometimes inform me about what kind of long term effects a decision will have, but it is too infrequent and vague. I don't want to hear, "this is a disastrous decision, and you are a traitor to the country!" I want to be told what the disaster will be, or at least might be, and I want to be able to fire people who can't actually articulate their policy ideas at a level higher than a Daily Mail columnist. This lack of transparency is made worse by the arbitrary autosave feature on a single save file, so that in order to understand what outcomes a given conversation actually will lead to, a significant amount of reloading and clicking through repetitive walls of text is necessary at important and tense moments. At first, this problem only lessened the appeal of what was otherwise a very good narrative, but by the end of my first game it caused me to check out and simply click through the last hour without any particular sense of investment or enjoyment.
Will signing a defensive alliance with Agnolia, but refusing to recognise their island seizure diplomatically isolate me later from someone I care a lot more about pleasing? I have no idea! Seems like something my advisors might have some input on, but apparently I didn't have the foresight to ask anyone about it. Did I stop an immediate investigation into somebody's shady behaviour in order to wait for a stronger lead? That's what I was told I was doing, but instead it turns out I've just closed the investigation completely. That's odd, because it isn't the option I selected. Should I go after one set of enemies now, with the opportunity to go after others later, or is it a one-shot only deal? Can I nationalize major corporations any time, or can I only ever do it at one particular meeting in all of my four year term? Not a clue, and not one of the dozens of people whose entire job is to help me make decisions is going to tell me. How does investing in agriculture vs. transport differently affect my country? I haven't the faintest idea, and neither does my world-renowned genius economics minister (while I'm on the topic of my world-renowned genius economics minister, why is this imbecile suggesting I invest in agriculture in a region with extensive untapped oil deposits? Words fail me. Evidently Sollist education is worse than anybody dreamed of). Is promising my wife that I'll pass a law which will prevent men from beating their wives going to cost as much as massively increasing the size of both the military and welfare programs? I have no idea how on Earth that could be the case, but if it is, maybe I should know ahead of time! Lileas Graf bitching about how it will offend the supreme court is great, but it just isn't quite enough clarity.
These kinds of outcomes need to be a lot clearer in a game where I have no option to reload anything except the most recent meeting at best. Decisions in politics have ramifications people will not foresee, and it's wonderful that there's an attempt being made here to model that uncertainty, but it shouldn't feel like I am being advised by moody teenagers who I can only occasionally rouse to make half-assed guesses about what might conceivably follow. The information my advisors give me could be wrong, but at least let them make an effort to give it to me regularly, or else give me the option to save and reload so that when I do understand the outcomes I don't feel cheated by the fact that the decision I thought I was making is rather different from the one I have actually made.
All of these problems can be solved by going online to check strategy guides, but that shouldn't be necessary and utterly ruins the narrative immersion which is the soul of a game like this.
If you are along primarily for the dramatic ride, then this game is absolutely appropriate for you. If you don't mind roleplaying out the same major events a dozen times to get different outcomes or to perfect your decisions, then you will get a lot out of it. There is a lot of charm here, and some people will not get tired of it quickly. But I don't want to spend 8 hours watching Petr Vectern rail waitresses and mollycoddling my whiny son, in order to make decisions which I wouldn't have made if anyone had bothered mentioning the consequences to me.
The key selling point of this game is a dramatic and interesting narrative, and for the price I do not feel cheated. Yet I would have happily paid substantially more for a game that had a less rail-roaded narrative and which did a better job helping me understand what is going on. From the length and number of my complaints, it's easy to see the level of emotional and intellectual interest it can generate. But good writing is not enough for this game to work. Make your choice advisedly.