Have you ever wanted to run the world? Well now you can in Secret Government!
Hiding behind governments the world over you can utilise your shadowy figures to cause revolutions and wars, shape the path of human development, or if you’re like me, simply get found out and stabbed by another shadowy organisation who are also enforcing their view of humanity on the world.
Starting out in the 17th century, you must rebuild your society from the ashes of old, recruiting more members, spreading out across Europe and slowly but surely infiltrating it all. Governments can be corrupted, gaining power in different sectors, which then allows you to use this power for your own gain.
Secret ideologies are nothing without members to spread it, so maintaining a strong workforce is a must. You have to use your agents to complete tasks around the world, while also ensuring your council of members is full, giving you various advantages and bonuses to your organisation. 17th Century Europe is a complicated place, and even when you have a finger in every pie, some people just want to fight.
Befitting secret organisations, you must remain unseen. Doing practically anything makes the people aware of you, so you must manage your secrecy, rotating members out of active duty and into seclusion to ensure they are not outed, and at times performing operations to move your organisation back into the shadows. This removal of secrecy can be leveraged for your own good, making countries aware of rival organisations can cause them to lose control over political structures, or giving the public enough visibility of these rival organisations to destroy them completely.
While they can be utilised for your good, controlling all of these masses is a difficult task. The easiest way to do this is to use the existing power structures and manipulate political parties by endorsing, decrying or even just offing these supposed leaders. For more overarching and subtle changes, the trends and feelings of humans can be altered, changing societal perception on wealth, immigration, the way the people are governed.
All of this power, all of this freedom to shape the world to become your utopia, yet there are still those who work against you. Rival lodges, orders of people who work against you operate in the world, will actively pursue their own goals against yours.
Befitting a game of this scope, there are quite a many things that can be done in Secret Government. While this does give you many paths to domination, and, at least for me, more than enough granularity to shape the world exactly as I want it, it does make it rather difficult to understand what is going on, and how exactly, say, increasing immigration in Bulgaria will affect the macro economic-politics of Europe.
Playing through Secret Government, is a great time, though it does feel like I require a little more in the way of a politics degree. While it is currently in early access, the game feels very well fleshed out, and with story campaigns planned for the future, Secret Government looks to be a great game in the making.
Secret Government is available on Steam, and is scheduled to fully release November of 2020.
