A War Of A Madman's Making is a quietly brilliant, totally free political sim where you have to try to survive as a deranged dictator's henchman

GamesVisual NovelA War Of A Madman’s Making is a quietly brilliant, totally free political sim where you have to try to survive as a deranged dictator’s henchmanWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Witching Metal Productions)

Three figures, one uniformed, one wearing a suit, and one wearing a Soviet-style suit, stand smugly with their hands on their hips.

Underrated aspect of totalitarian dictatorships: they’re a great opportunity for social advancement. You could barely move in a 20th-century autocracy without stepping into the recently vacated shoes of some mid-tier bureaucrat or other.

(Image credit: Witching Metal Productions)

Three figures looking smug. One of them says “We’re all disgusting dogs here."

Gather the forces, armour the horses

The Great Leader’s a man with a plan, you see. The whole world is reeling from the third great war, a war that ended with a nuclear stalemate. The scheme? To finally ride that wave all the way to its glorious conclusion.

The Great Leader has ordered troops to mass on the border, ready to spill over and liberate your neighbours as soon as he waves his hand. Thepreviousmilitary chief didn’t love the plan, so he’s gone. Now it’s your job, and you enter into it just a day or two before the invasion is set to begin.

In other words, you’re screwed.

In other words, you’re screwed. A War Of A Madman’s Making isn’t really a political sim so much as it’s a political survival sim—your task is to paddle through the shark-filled water of politics without losing your head or your family. How hard that is (it’s always quite hard) depends in large part on the choices you make about your origin at the game’s start.

(Image credit: Witching Metal Productions)

A large man in a military uniform, named The Great Leader. He is saying “Once we kick the door, the whole rotting structure will come falling down."

Are you a member of the national majority ethnicity, from a wealthy family, who conducted himself with aplomb in his career in either army, navy, or air force and has never wavered from the Great Leader’s vision? You come into the game with a surplus of the boss' favour and relatively few skeletons in the closet for other ministries and ministers to deploy against you.

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If you’re me, though, you obviously went fully the other way with it. I played an ethnic minority from a poor background who threw himself wholeheartedly into the anti-Leader revolutionary underground. My first meeting with the man in charge was tense and his underlings—my peers at the top of the ministries of defence, finance, and propaganda—dropped barely veiled threats about my past. Tough crowd.

(Image credit: Witching Metal Productions)

A man in a military uniform tells the player, “We need to create a secret branch of the military."

That’s before you even get into actually running the war, which requires balancing the competing aims of military necessity and the chief’s ridiculous whims—invade on all possible fronts at once, capture the capital immediately, put a bunch of untrained conscripts right in the vanguard—all at once.

Plus, there’s no guaranteeyourideas are any better. Fancy explaining to the big man in your weekly meetings that you disobeyed his instructions and failed anyway?

All the while, you’re making a gamut of other life-or-death decisions. Which minister, if any, are you gonna throw your lot in with? Want to spend your limited budget on a personal security force in case things go south and you need protection, money that could otherwise be spent on the war? How’s your family taking this?

(Image credit: Witching Metal Productions)

A highly decorated military officer tells the player, “It’s a fuckin' nightmare."

Also, why is your daughter speaking like a cowboy? In my game, one of my two daughters had decided she was pretty much John Wayne after getting on a western kick, for reasons unknown to me.

(Image credit: Witching Metal Productions)

An interior shot of a prison. The subtitles read “You will spend your days breaking large rocks into smaller rocks."

And the consequences are entirely yours. I admit, I’ve not seen any of the game’s promised five endings yet. I keep finding myself breaking rocks in one of the Great Leader’s numerous correctional facilities. It was probably something I said.

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Gather the forces, armour the horses#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Gather the forces, armour the horses

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals