The Game Where You Rebuild Politics from Absolute Scratch
REVIEW: 2020's Shadow Empire by VR Designs
INTRO: WAR IS SWELL
The previous ruler is buried. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. His reign secured a modest border, placated the raider clans, and oversaw a fledgling private economy that pulled us from the brink of starvation. Yet few beyond the inner circle knew his name, or even that he existed — mass politics seldom concern those who would spill blood for a single gulp of precious water.
They will know your name, however, for your reign will bring them either glory or extinction.
Over two centuries have passed since the Galactic Republic’s transmissions fell quiet. The ancient reactor is soon to fail, and the last man capable of repairing it died twenty generations ago. If your people are to emerge from humanity’s New Dark Age with their freedom and their lives, they must expand their borders, relearn what was lost, and organize a new civilization.
But men have become selfish in their desperation. Citizen, soldier, and minister alike will gladly stick a knife in his brother’s back if it will buy just one more day. You are wiser and more charismatic than even your predecessor, but will it be enough to keep the marauders at bay and rebuild a civil society?
Outside, the cheering throngs grow loud and restless. It is time for you to deliver the Ascension Speech, O Mighty August. The challenge ahead of you is grave, but for the sake of us all, you must succeed. Go, now — your subjects would behold their new leader.
2020’s Shadow Empire is a 4X/Wargame1 by VR Designs and is possibly my favorite strategy game of all time.
We might as well begin with the premise, which I’d call the most compelling in the entire genre: you are the totalitarian premier of a tiny nation on a procedurally generated, post-apocalyptic colony planet about which you know virtually nothing at game-start. Millennia into the future, a cataclysmic, galaxy-shattering war has completely isolated your world from all other vestiges of humanity. Generations of instability have reduced your people to medieval barbarism, and only a fickle volunteer militia protects the huddled masses from the dieselpunk ruins of interstellar republicanism.
But the last shots were fired lifetimes ago, and the Galactic Republic feels almost as distant a memory as the Gaian homeworld that humanity left behind millennia before your birth. To win the game and ensure a future for your nation and its people, you’ll have to build an enduring politics that can discover, develop, and dominate the planet before a less scrupulous leader can beat you to it. Whether you do so by plow, by pen, or by warhead is your decision to make, but the consequences will be borne by your subjects. Try not to screw this up, chief.
Shadow Empire is, perhaps more than any other game I’ve played, as engrossing and authentic as it is conspicuously flawed. I feel strangely about calling it “possibly my favorite strategy game of all time,” not least because I’ve also played some of the Civilization and Hearts of Iron games — a series of mechanically superior 4Xs and a series of mechanically superior wargames, respectively. But I can immediately point to three central characteristics that set Shadow Empire apart from more familiar strategy-gaming fare:
It’s immensely systems-driven, with deep and engaging simulations of everything from internal politics to oceanic salinity.
It was designed, written, and programmed by a single Dutchman with a robust background in auteur wargame design who made very few compromises.
Above all else, it’s a game about people, their societies, and their politics.
It’s also, despite being one of my all-time favorites, a distinctly niche title that I struggle to recommend to most gamers. Its 400-page manual is both all but mandatory and curiously incomprehensive, leaving many of its wargaming mechanics completely unaddressed — this is the sort of game wherein you’re expected to understand the difference between “Soft Attack,” “Hard Attack,” and “Fire Power” going in, and it is not prepared to accommodate the struggling or confused player even on the lowest difficulty settings. This game is strictly intended for those willing to make a significant up-front investment of time and concentration in return for an entirely unique gaming experience. Personally, I reckon it delivers in spades.
But given the sheer complexity on display, I’m going to take a very high-level approach to reviewing the game for want of keeping this newsletter under a hundred pages. Of particular note is that I’m hardly going to say a word about the ground-level warmaking gameplay, because it’s absolutely jargon-packed and hardly the most interesting thing on offer anyway.
Instead, I want to tell you about why this esoteric relic of PC strategy is such a fascinating reflection of the principle we discussed last week, i.e., that modern games tend to be made either to stimulate the creativity and emotions of their players or to numb them. Shadow Empire is one of an exceptionally rare kind that intentionally and successfully engenders numbness as a tool of emotionally powerful storytelling. Clicky PC strategy games are notoriously effective at capturing players’ attention and holding it for many hours at a time, although rarely toward narratively satisfying or even particularly memorable ends — just ask anyone with over a thousand hours in Europa Universalis IV or the like.2 What sets Shadow Empire apart in this regard is how it uses the numbing effect of turn-based resource management to tell a story about politics and social organization, and I’m going to do my best to lay it out for you without trapping us in the swampy mire of wargaming terminology.
It’ll be a pretty long one, so let’s dive right in, shall we?
SIMULATIONS AND SIMULACRA
It all begins with Planet Generation, which I believe to be the deepest simulation of its kind in gaming history.3 Your first decision — the class of planet on which the game will take place — is arguably the most important decision of the entire campaign, because it sets the ground rules and is the primary source of Shadow Empire’s immense replayability. An Earth-like planet with temperate climates and a breathable atmosphere, for example, will make resource management a breeze but will give rise to tall forests and thick jungles that your logistical networks can scarcely penetrate. A lifeless desert world will simplify your operational tactics, but drinkable water will be more valuable than gold. Without a biosphere, there will be no buried crude oil to refine into fuel. And worst of all, even a grazing wound can be immediately fatal if it damages an enviro-suit and fills the lungs with ammoniated haze.
If you select Detailed Planet Generation at game-start, you’ll also get to roll for planetary geology and ecology. You might find yourself on anything from a verdant paradise to a nightmarish hell-world covered in steaming oceans of battery acid. An ecosystem of plants and animals will provide reliable food sources… assuming their tissues are water-based and digestible rather than sulfuric and poisonous. But even if the wildlife is certified kosher and comes with fries, worlds with plentiful prey and/or a low gravitational pull will often evolve twenty-meter megafauna that’d bring Frank Herbert to gushing climax as they devour your hapless infantry. Besides, rumor has it that some of them are sentient, and the natives probably won’t care for our pretensions to global dominion.
Detailed Generation also includes steps for generating a sociopolitical history, including the histories of the planet’s colonization and societal collapse. And again, the simulations are deeply interconnected. Comfortable, resource-rich planets will attract hundreds of millions of colonists and leave behind the ruins of their megacities for your exploitation. Barren hellscapes, by contrast, will usually encourage a particularly stressful dissolution — what few survivors remain will tend to do so by virtue of being the most ruthlessly violent, and they’ll be disinclined to share what few resources are left. It all carries over into direct gameplay consequences. If your capital is surrounded by ore deposits and scavengable ruins, your citizens will take it upon themselves to build private mining operations whose output you may tax. If not, or if your public sector beats them to it, they’ll instead build schools, sewage systems, and other utilities to improve their communities and strengthen your budding civilization.
Remove from your mind any notion that these detailed planetological and sociological simulations are just gimmickry — in Shadow Empire, the planet is no less important a character than any of the named humans, and the simulation’s granularity is what gives it depth, nuance, and even a backstory. And remember: you’re not playing as a team of intellectual and highly motivated colonists as in most space-themed 4X games — the people of Shadow Empire are centuries removed from that era, have become thoroughly native over the generations, and are shaped by their physical environment. Because every planet is unique, so too is every culture that populates them.
Let’s talk some more about those cultures and their impact.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Before the game properly begins, you get to make a few decisions about the post-collapse history of your regime. When food was scarce, did your forefathers give hope to the rioters, or did they gun them all down to send a message? Is yours a society of technocratic commercialism, authoritarian enforcement, meritocratic central planning, or some whimsical combination? Your answers inform what the game calls your Regime Profile, which is basically a summary of your national politics that evolves throughout the game.
Extreme Profiles unlock powerful national buffs, but imply all the foibles of an extremist ideology and can dramatically alter the character of a nation. For example, going all-in on Meritocracy at the expense of Democracy will tend to produce highly skilled and capable ministers, but also an enormous and unhappy class of disenfranchised laborers. Whether you manage it by extending the franchise, by pivoting toward a communal ethos, or by simply opening fire on anyone who complains is up to you, and your decisions will either alter or entrench your ruling ideology.
Your national politics and their evolution over time have significant downstream effects on your personnel. Every single member of your administration is a named character with a portrait, a set of skills, a distinct personality, and a personal agenda that they will actively pursue. As long as they remain notionally loyal, they will follow your every order to the letter. But if you offend their political sensibilities, disrespect them, or otherwise make their lives difficult, they won’t remain notionally loyal for long. If your ministers or commanders become discontented, you’ll often have to burn lots of cash to replace them or even change your policies to keep them from embezzling or rebelling. Failing that, Regime Profiles with a high Autocracy score might just assassinate a problematic leader. Or perhaps an aggrieved general could be ordered to lead an expedition into the unexplored arachnid hive half a world away. Be a shame if he didn’t come back, of course, but great leaders must sometimes make difficult decisions...
To my mind, Shadow Empire is fundamentally a game about people and about how they organize and cooperate (or don’t) under extreme circumstances. Every word of simulation I describe above somehow connects back to these core themes, and for my money, the humanity of Shadow Empire is the game’s greatest strength. The systems are designed to make the player feel like the absolute ruler of a post-apocalyptic society, including all of the stress and uncertainty inherent to such a lofty responsibility. How would you go about rebuilding a nation if you knew that your failure would mean the literal extinction of your civilization and its culture?
And, not for nothing, this is the only strategy game I’ve ever personally played in which occasionally committing gruesome atrocity can genuinely feel like the most rational strategy instead of just feeling edgily contrarian.4 For example: you probably don’t want to order your military to fire on that vanguard of striking utility workers, but our crops will die and everyone will starve if that power plant stays offline... This sort of compelling, emergent drama is what all of this densely interconnecting simulation is working towards, and it will succeed as long as you’re willing to meet it halfway.
DESIGN LANGUAGE AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE
Shadow Empire’s official manual lists designer-developer Victor “Vic” Reijkersz as near enough the game’s sole dev,5 and you know what that means: for better or worse, the finished product represents the singular vision of exactly one obsessed creator — my very favorite kind of game to play. In fact, you get exposed to the game’s auteur energy before you even start it up, because the manual begins with a solid fifteen pages of expository fiction written by Vic himself. It ain’t quite to a Proustian standard of prose, since bro is a developer of strategy games rather than an institutionally trained author of English-language drama, but that just makes it feel more genuine.
See, when I first read the Shadow Empire manual and admired its nineties-era bootleg aesthetic, I immediately perceived the cognitive dissonance between the author’s enthusiasm for his work and the relative friction in translating that enthusiasm into high-quality presentation. My body began to undergo the same parasympathetic cringe response that you get when you chance across erotic Sonic the Hedgehog fan-art. But then my nervous system just kind of… didn’t follow through, and I excitedly stuck with it because I share the creator’s enthusiasm and am entirely on his wavelength. It’s one of those peculiar cases where the writing feels so authentically personal and the design so earnestly thoughtful that I suspect I’d enjoy it less were it subjected to comprehensive copy-editing and graphical polish.
Now, don’t let me give you the impression that Shadow Empire is hasty or unpolished in its presentation. The low-fidelity artwork and database-ass user interface certainly contribute to an unpolished vibe, but that’s part of the illusion: you’re playing as the leader of a vast bureaucracy in a pre-industrial society of desperate survivors, so we can hardly expect Power BI. Interfacing with the game instead feels like operating one of the ancient computers in a Cold War missile silo — heavy buttons, glowing toggles, and reams upon reams of mechanically typeset reports are your constant companions. Even the negative space containing the buttons and toggles appears rusty and patinaed.
Then there’s the original soundtrack by Italian outfit Tempest for an Angel, which stands toe-to-toe with any great strategy game OST. Alternately haunting and inspiring, it’s an indispensable component of Shadow Empire’s viscerally uncanny atmosphere. Even if you never play the game yourself, I strongly recommend that you at least give the music a listen.
LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR...
Shadow Empire doesn’t really implement a narrative as most games do. Instead, there’s the emergent story told by each campaign and a metanarrative that ties every campaign together (the game’s name is derived from this metanarrative, the details of which are too nifty to spoil). Given my understanding of the lore, I think it’s fair to say that each playthrough is technically canon even if the player screws it up hilariously — whomever wipes out your regime becomes the hero of the story instead. That’s because, in its purest essence, this is a game about humans rather than just their nations. Or, put another way, it’s a game about nations in their capacity as reified images of their peoples’ beliefs and aspirations.
Shadow Empire persistently and forcibly reiterates a fundamental truth of mass politics: organizing a free and just society requires effort and dedication from every participant, and it’s real hard work. And if at any point you lack the will or the resources to effectuate that hard work, you’ll have to deal with the parallel challenges of surviving in an unfree and repressive society. Lasting progress is a function of cooperation, and it simply doesn’t grow if any of its human coefficients aren’t locked in. You can’t win a game of Shadow Empire by ordering your citizens to kick back and have another cheeseburger, just as you can’t bring about liberty and justice in real life by passively waiting for it all to materialize around you.
The first few turns of a given Shadow Empire campaign are usually quite dry and uneventful from a primary gameplay perspective, but they nevertheless feel nothing short of momentous even after dozens of campaigns. You know that moment when you first emerge from the Vault in Fallout 3 or from the grave in New Vegas and get momentarily blinded by the sunlight as the vastness of the world begins to sink in? Perhaps the single nicest thing I can say about Shadow Empire is that it recreates that feeling at the beginning of every campaign as though it were your very first time, and it does so in the almost complete absence of narrative context or even animation. All it needs is the spectacle of a desolate wasteland being gradually reclaimed by the spirit of man for the effect to land. For all its post-apocalyptic theming, it’s an oddly hopeful game.
Incidentally, I suppose it shouldn’t go unacknowledged that temporarily re-obsessing myself with Shadow Empire was, at least in part, a means of coping with the frustration of watching real-life society flail from one cartoonish extreme to the next. See, there’s a funny thing about the real world of late that occurred to me while I was deciding whether or not to temporarily pivot toward Autocracy for some warmaking bonuses. If I take a mental inventory of every significant delta in world politics over the last five years or so and weigh my opinions, the scale tilts decisively toward despondency over hopefulness. But if I take a big step back, I see previously indomitable structures of repression collapsing under the weight of history just as surely as the rest of the civilizational order under which I grew up. That much gives me cause for hope.
So too did the abovementioned campaign, by the way. I ended up deciding against the Autocracy pivot, instead doubling down on Heart for the Joint Struggle bonus. That way, I could afford more troops who’d be less likely to retreat. Those bastard raiders didn’t know what him ‘em, and I ended up with some kind of libertarian-municipalist nation with an unusually bloated military budget. Commiserations to Murray Bookchin, who must’ve been spinning in his casket like a pulsar by the time my zealously communalist citizenry got to constructing a nuclear deterrent.
Shadow Empire, much like our meatspace politics, is not about any one leader or even any one government. It’s about the people that participate in the nation-building process and about their struggles to maximize positive outcomes for themselves and their neighbors in a world without enough positive outcomes to go around. In the game, you are their totalitarian overlord whose whims dictate the course of their lives, but you can never dictate their thoughts, desires, or hopes. Even when the people are broke, hungry, and disenfranchised, the spirit of freedom is remarkably difficult to snuff out. I’d ask Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad to back me up on that, but neither of them are answering their phones.
It all comes back to Shadow Empire’s wack-ass user interface, of all things. Even as the copy and the character art have dramatically improved since release, UI scaling remains practically non-existent, input elements feel sticky and unreliable, text is jumbled and misaligned… and I love it all. It really puts you in the shoes of the supreme commander of a vast bureaucracy that manages countless personnel of every imaginable affect who can just barely be corralled toward a mutual objective. You know what I mean if you’ve ever worked in an organization with several hundred employees. Some of them, of course, just dick around all day because no one is properly supervising them and it’s an easy paycheck. A precious few are indispensably loyal, while many more are indispensable but untrustworthy. Most of them, however, are like you and me: trying to do the best they can in spite of a woeful lack of institutional support, because that’s still the surest means of beating back the oblivion of hopelessness.
Til next time <3
Shadow Empire is available for purchase on Steam or directly from the publisher. God bless you if you decide to take the plunge — just be sure to read the manual first.
Have you ever been helplessly dependent on a PC strategy game? Tell me about it!
For the uninitiated: 1) 4X is short for “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate” and generally describes strategy games with a focus on managing territory and resources over operational tactics. 2) Wargames (in a recreational context) are a tradition of armed conflict simulations with roots on the tabletop. Modern computer wargames tend to favor extremely granular simulation and are notoriously difficult to learn but can be deeply gratifying to master.
Don’t look at me — I’ve only logged 650 or so.
I guess Aurora 4X might have it beat, but that beast seriously blurs the line between “game” and “office productivity software.” I’ll have to write about it some time.
I hear a lot of people say the same about Frostpunk, but I still haven’t gotten around to that one. For a game that successfully leans into edgy contrarianism in its gruesome atrocities, see Fallout 2.
He got some outside help with artwork, music, and proofreading.
You sonofabitch. I uninstalled all my precious, precious 4X/wargames from steam in the winter to help pull myself out of a deep depressive pit. They acted exactly as you have described, to numb. In fact, when I read your previous piece on the artisitic uniqueness of video games I thought about my shameful hoard of paradox/creative assembly/firaxis games. Now you're telling me there's a baroquely detailed 4X wargame where the numbness of repetitive gameplay is a feature of the narrative experience? Fuck.
I can't believe I've never heard of this, it seems right up my alley. I kind of love a game I can jump into knowing that in 100 hours time I will still barely understand what's going on