Any fully text based games recommendations like Suzerain or Disco Elysium ??

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Does anyone have recommendations for fully text based games that have mechanics similar to either of these games . If so where can I find them??

Suzerain is a political simulator where you play the president of country that is like an alternate version of turkey . The president has set traits and characteristics but you can control his actions . It is text based but has visuals like news reports , drawings of the characters etc .

Disco Elysium is not a political simulator but I like the game mechanics from the different political ideologies it lets you play in the game .

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I haven’t played Suzerain, but if you’re interested in political simulations, I would definitely recommend Autumn Chen’s Social Democracy: An Alternate History, which is a game where you play as the Social Democratic Party in 1930s Germany and try to prevent the Nazis from rising to power. You get to vote on policies and so on and see what happens. Very difficult but fun. There’s a large community on the fanmade Reddit forum and fanmade Discord server, and there are even full-on conversion mods like Biennio Rosso: An Alternate History, a fanmade mod about 1930s Italy. I haven’t played that one.

The game has a sequel called Social Democracy: Petrograd 1917, which is about the 1910s in Russia. I haven’t played that one either, but I think it’s not completely finished compared to the original. I would play Social Democracy: An Alternate History first. I will warn you that there’s a fair amount of reading you’ll have to do about the political system of 1930s Germany before you can really get started in Social Democracy, however.

I haven’t played too many political simulation games besides that one, at least out of the games I’ve enjoyed. I can’t think of many IF games that let you decide on political policies/ideologies in a way that affects the narrative, like Disco Elysium does. But I could be proven wrong, if someone else has their own recommendations for games like that.

You may also enjoy Thousand Lives, which is about the life of a woman in communist Poland. I think there are certain points where she can align herself with or against the communist government. But the game has a feature where you have to play it via email, can only make one choice a day, and need to wait for results to get emailed to you the next day. That prevented me from finishing it, since I’m terrible about checking my email in a timely manner, and if you wait too long, your email gets cleared from the database and you have to restart.

I might be able to give more recommendations if you added more details on what exactly you liked about those two games. Was it the politics, the history, the simulation/management, or something else?

Edit to add: If you just want a good, long, detailed text game to dive into that has really in-depth mechanics, I think you can’t go wrong with Trigaea. It’s an extremely long science fiction RPG made in Twine, around 12 hours long. I never finished that one either, because it takes so long and I gave up on my existing run, but it’s worth checking out at least.

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Wow Autumn Chen seems to have a large fanbase for an interactive fiction game maker . I know a website full of posters who would enjoy her Alt history type games . For one the alt history forum, spacebattles forum , suzerain players etc.

I do wish she had some type of like game play tutorial . The over all game seems very interesting with alot of branching ,choices and depths .

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Yeah, Social Democracy can be hard to get into but really fun once you do get into it. Her other games are pretty good too, though they don’t have as much of a political simulation focus. Think she’s working on a Steam release for the first Social Democracy game, and the games have been getting consistent updates, so maybe a good tutorial will be added at some point.

I’ve spent some time on Spacebattles and alt history forums and I’ve always gotten the impression they’re more for people to post and discuss original writing or fanfiction instead, but I guess if someone brought it up in the videogame subsection it could garner some interest. I wouldn’t be the one to do it, though, haven’t touched those accounts in ages.

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Well spacebattles actually has this thing called let’s play where like a popular poster will go through and play a video game all the way through and narrate, take screen shots and in the game of an interactive game actually utilize the forum to pick what choices to pick for the game . Depending on the poster and game these posts can be massive.

Space battles also has a thing called Quests :disappointed_face: funny enough they act like interactive text based fiction but all the game is on the forum . The player is everyone posting on the thread . Some quests are so popular ppl have turned them into actual stories usually fanfics/ original fiction . Which is another thing due to space battles that helped several ppl posting web fiction online go viral. The most popular being the author of this web novel called worm that had fo many fanfic spinoff based off it . Then you got the lit RPG /isekai web novels too and alot of these authors make good money .

It’s a good website to market a product too if your aiming for a nerdy male audience into sci-fi , anime ,action/adventure etc . The quests are interesting alot of them have mechanics that could easily be turned into a real official interactive game .

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Didn’t know about let’s plays, sounds like a fun way to go through a game. I’ve seen quests before and I think there’s been some discussion of them on this forum. Wildbow too, he’s very popular in certain parts of the Internet. I’ve always thought interactive fiction based on one of his settings would be very cool, but I haven’t caught up with his writing in a long while.

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There’s a Let’s Play category for IF on this very forum: Topics tagged lets-play

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