Neither an ox nor a donkey is able to stop the progress of socialism
Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall is a 2018 Political Strategy Game by Kremlingames. Set on the year 1989, it puts the player in the shoes of a leader of one of the Eastern Bloc nations or of several other socialist states (Cuba, North Korea, and Afghanistan), who has to contend with enemies both internal and external. Voices from the party and the people look West — but is that the only way forward? Or is the dream of Allende finally within reach?
This game contains examples of:
- Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Under very specific circumstances the SED can elect Sigmund Jähn the leader of DDR and buy the MIR station from the Soviets due to a party meeting gone wrong. Obviously, alcohol is to blame.
- Alternate History:
- This game provides an opportunity to realize many potential scenarios, including individual options for each nation. For example, playing for Bulgaria, you can not only avoid the collapse of Yugoslavia but also form a single socialist federation of the Balkans, where, in addition to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, Albania will also enter. Or, playing for Romania, you have the opportunity to restore the monarchy.
- In addition, there are a number of common features such as the ability to influence the fate of the USSR or your final membership in various international organizations, both Western and socialist.
- The DLC "Paths of History" added even more of this, where at the beginning of the game you can send certain countries down to certain paths.
- Appeal to Force: Hungary won't voluntarily join a hardcore communist CSTO, but they can be "persuaded" if you have nuclear weapons.
- Assassination Attempt: Assassinating Kaysone Phomvihane and Deng Xiaoping takes Laos and China away from the path of market reforms. The game also allows your agents to eliminate Dick Spring in order for the leftists to unite in Ireland.
- Back from the Brink: If the GKCHP takes control with the help of the player the USSR will avoid its historical fate and will try to restore some of its influence in eastern Europe and Afghanistan. Watered down if you don't help the committee but instead kill Yeltsin and his allies, since here while the USSR survives they wont come back to haunt you.
- Civil War: As the Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan, the civil war there resumes in earnest.
- Commie Land: That's you, in the historical final days of Communism. Can you stay this way? Do you want to?
- Commie Nazis: Several routes in many countries combine orthodox socialist economics with nationalist politics and a certain skepticism of the Soviet Union. In-game, these are usually classed under Authoritarianism, though that ideology also refers to market-economy dictatorships like post-Tiananmen China. Playable examples include:
- The GDR can invite a known Nazi to be part of your cabinet as interior minister, and adopt Strasserism as the ideology of the SED.
- In Poland, if you keep the Party's old guard, you can adopt an independent, nationalistic socialism based on an alliance between the Party, the Church, and optionally the right-wing state syndicalists.
- Romania's National Communism is pretty much this, combining unreformed socialist economics with an aggressive nationalist platform, and a little of North Korea's Juche for flavor.
- Solakov is a potential Bulgarian leader, supporting aggressive Left Nationalism and separation from Soviet interests in favor of expanding Bulgaria's geopolitical power.
- North Korea is already effectively an absolute communist monarchy, and their Juche is the model of left-nationalism that Romania and other National Communists strive to emulate.
- The Coup:
- Should you anger the party and or the USSR too much they can try to overthrow you and pave the way for one of several forms of change.
- The GKCHP (State Emergency Committee) can attempt to overthrow a collapsing Soviet government. Success will restore the status quo, and failure will mean the end of the Union.
- Cult of Personality: Under certain circumstances is possible to do a successful Cultural Revolution and become the sun of your nation once the august coup happens. It doesn't always end up well for you, though. Once you are the sun, you are more useful dead for certain individuals.
- Dystopia Is Hard: It's possible to stay hardline commie, but it means you're going to be juggling insufficient finances, growing unrest, an overstretched Secret Police, and pressure from your own party, especially as aid from the Soviet Union dries up and Gorbachev demands that you start reforming. This is doubly the case in "Gorbachev's Call" mode, where you're unlikely to have enough money or agents to hold power by force alone.
- Enemy Mine: Margaret Thatcher is no friend to Communism, but you can support her re-election because she's opposed to the EU and to German reunification.
- Former Regime Personnel: If East Germany reforms, you can recruit the agents of the collapsing Stasi into your own Secret Police.
- Full-Circle Revolution:
- In Romania, Ion Iliescu can potentially overthrow Nicolae Ceausescu and then go right back to communism. Alternatively, the Stalinist Gheorghe Apostol can take power, and while he eliminates the nationalistic and de-facto monarchist aspects of the Ceausescu dictatorship, things don't really change much for the people.
- It's possible to agree to democratic reforms in the Polish opening game to buy time for the Polish Socialist Workers' Party, then ban the opposition later on and go back to orthodox socialism or left-nationalism. You can do this with other countries too to some degree, but Poland's events make the country particularly suited to it.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: If you help the GKCHP to take power they will ask the former WPO to submit to their rule, again, at that point you can either ask NATO to protect you for your mistake, kiss the boot, refuse and die just like Hungary in 1956, or if you have nuclear weapons, you can denounce the Soviets as revisionists and go your own way.
- Hegemonic Empire:
- The game models the complex Soviet hegemony as it's beginning to collapse and retreat. The Soviet Union controls Eastern Europe through the Warsaw Pact, while the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance is the Soviet economic hegemony. As the Soviets retrench, the player country has the option to assume control of the hegemony without the Soviet Union, forming the New CMEA when the Soviets end economic aid, and later setting up the Collective Security Treaty Organizationnote when the Soviets withdraw their troops from the Pact.
- NATO and the European Community are the American hegemony, and they're moving in on Eastern Europe as the Soviets decline. You can join, or try to withstand the storm.
- Hereditary Republic: Romania's dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, can set the groundwork for one of his sons to inherit the Socialist Republic of Romania after him.
- His Own Worst Enemy: The game has several achievements that consist of losing the game under specific circumstances and or to get a certain outcome (such as "for no reason" and "want but can not").
- Hobbes Was Right: Averted. An automated economy under a multiparty system and liberal freedoms is entirely possible, as is a capitalist liberal democracy.
- Landslide Election: A "constitutional majority" requires you to win 2/3 of the seats in your country's legislature. As you begin as a Communist dictatorship, it's expected that you win this level of control in each election, otherwise your party will not be happy with you.
- The Load: Poland is this for the Eastern Bloc, assuming you're not playing as them. Their country is collapsing, and if socialist unity weakens even a little, they'll go reformist - which weakens socialist unity further and can start a chain of Disaster Dominoes. Even if you hold the Bloc together, if you don't spend massive amounts of money to buy out their debt, they'll decommunize regardless (sometimes in a more authoritarian direction).
- Master Computer: Cybersyn, a technology you can develop if you go all-in on computer science. An analog of a similar project from Chile, Cybersyn is a system for automating your socialist republic's economic planning and eliminating bureaucratic waste. It also pisses off your Party by reducing corruption, so be careful implementing it.
- Political Strategy Game: In Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall, you control the politics of a eastern bloc nation of your choice (although Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Afghanistan, Cuba, and North Korea are DLC-only) and how your country will react to the wave of revolutions and changes of 1989 to 1992.
- Press X to Die: As Hungary in the 4 reformers events you are handed 4 challengers to the position of leader, but two of them just lead to a game over: Pozgay and Niersz.
- Repressive, but Efficient: East Germany is a rare point of light in the Eastern Bloc, with a large economy and an almost Western standard of living, as well as a Secret Police organization nearly as famed as the Soviet KGB. In principle, East Germany's economy could easily survive despite the fall of communism and the loss of Soviet aid, if the people weren't also starting to smell freedom in the air.
- Rising Empire: The player nation can become this if played well enough. They can take over the former responsibilities of the Soviet Union, employ their Secret Police to stop reforms in other socialist countries, and a couple of countries have the option to expand directly.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: One way you can maintain the loyalty of your Party is to have some of the country's money end up in their Swiss bank accounts.
- Secret Police: It's Commie Land, what do you expect? They're invaluable both for keeping dangerous Western ideas out of your country and for providing Agents to meddle with other countries.
- Simulation Game: Here you play as one of the Eastern Bloc nations during the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
- Start My Own: The Soviet Union is withdrawing aid? The CMEA and the Warsaw Pact are collapsing? That's okay, you can set up your own CMEA and CSTO without the Russians. Before things get to that point, you can also agree to a "small Brezhnev Doctrine" where Eastern European countries agree to mutually support each other against the reformists, without Soviet involvement - which can persuade otherwise-reluctant allies like Hungary, an already-reformed Poland or independent communist Albania to work with the coalition.
- Succession Crisis: One of the difficulties the GDR has to deal with. Honecker is an old man who's having trouble with the duties of his office. Should the Party retire him, and if they do, who should replace him?
- Swiss Bank Account: One way to give your Party Unity a quick boost is to slip some of your country's money into numbered accounts for your Party officials. Doing this is very expensive, though.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: In one of the endings your character get served tea with arsenic.
- Vestigial Empire: The game takes place during the last days of the Soviet empire, as troops and subsidies are withdrawn from the periphery.
- Vote Early, Vote Often:
- If you have to hold an election, and don't think you have the people's support due to a rising tide of unpopularity or Westalgia, then you can always either instruct civil servants to vote for the Party, or have your Secret Police help count the votes. Neither will save you if your popularity is well and truly tanked, though.
- If you have a Leading-Party system, you can force other parties into an electoral alliance. If you have all parties either banned or allied with (as with East Germany's National Front) then you can run an election without fear because each constituency has one candidate - though such an "election" won't earn your rule any legitimacy.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Helping RAF (a real-life pro-communism terrorist organization) will help the socialist camp’s stability. Also you can engage in state terrorism like arranging incidents for delegate signing the Eurointegration pact.
