Social Democracy: An Alternate History

I couldn't win this game at its easiest difficulty, following the "Beginner's Guide" walkthrough highlighted on the game's subreddit. https://old.reddit.com/r/RedAutumnSPD/comments/1hkkt39/beginners_guide_to_social_democracy_an/

"as long as you keep implementing WTB plan, nothing you do would screw your position ... Support otto braun for president. If you kept zentrum relations good enough you'll win in a landslide." Instead, my Zentrist allies refused to enact WTB, Hitler took power at 40% unemployment, and I lost badly.

I tell you that story so as to clarify what I mean when I say that this game is hard. I probably spent about two hours with this game, taking careful notes on the Library, and playing carefully following the walkthrough, and I didn't even come close to winning.

I fully believe that if I invested six or seven hours in the game, I could eventually figure out how to win once (maybe mostly by luck?) at the easiest difficulty, and that every minute of playing it would hurt. The feeling of winning would be a sense of relief that I could finally stop playing.

With clear parallels to the US, the message of this game is one of historically informed hopelessness. It *ought* to be easy to defeat the far right, just spend money on social welfare, but the centrists will never agree to that, and so the far right will ride into power with historical inevitability, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

I respect that message, and I guess I'm glad that this game exists, but everything about it is unenjoyable. I feel like I wasted the time I spent trying to figure out how to win. Puzzle games need to have solutions that are surprising but inevitable in hindsight. This is a game where the solution is obvious, but where you're powerless to enact it.

Maybe I'll play it again if I find a better walkthrough, just to see what it's like to win, but I can't imagine ever enjoying this work of art.

And, that's the point of the game, I guess.