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

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.

In times of crisis? Boy, then it gets even better. Get a good war or foreign plot going and you can set your watch by the purges. Give it a day or two and you'll be chief plenipotentiary of an entire industrial subzone. Or dead. Perhaps both.

These are the kinds of things that run through your mind playing A War Of A Madman's Making, a rather excellent and rather free political sim/visual novel from Witching Metal Productions. Inspired by the likes of Suzerain and other difficult, grey compromise simulators, you play the role of a military middle-man catapulted to head of the army after your (fictional) country's "Great Leader" had the last one ousted.

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. The previous military 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. 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.

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.

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.

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 guarantee your ideas 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?

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.

All these questions and more. It's an excellent, challenging, chaotic thing, and all done for free in the relatively simple framework provided by the Renpy engine. Witching Metal clearly draws a lot of inspiration from the world's real-life autocracies—there's plenty of high Stalinism in there, some Pinochet, some Mussolini, and a lot of your common-or-garden interbellum weirdos besides those—without ever slipping into tedious parody. Its dystopian dictatorship feels entirely its own.

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.