Sovereign Tower Preview
I don’t care what your job is; if it involves managing or motivating other humans, it can be difficult. If your job is trying to keep a whole kingdom happy, well, good luck with that. That’s kind of the premise of Sovereign Tower, which is essentially a medieval fantasy people management sim. Sovereign Tower is light on technical demands — it can run in your browser — but surprisingly intriguing when it comes to mechanics.
You play as newly minted royalty, a wandering leper who somehow fulfilled a magical prophecy. Now your task is to recruit knights, placate the kingdom’s whiny citizens, and keep the power-hungry factions in line. The game does a good job of balancing humor and its slightly absurd premise with some believable, grounded-in-real-life situations.
The Daily Grind
Each round of Sovereign Tower is split into three parts. In the first section, you can take care of castle maintenance or building, hang with your knights or have some one-on-one time with your subjects and would-be knights via a royal audience. They come to you with a wide range of requests, complaints, problems and opportunities. In each case, you have several responses. You can take them seriously or dismiss them with a joke or insult. You can ask for more information. Every response has an immediate or long-term impact, but you can take as much time as you need to ponder decisions.
The next part of your day consists of a meeting at the Round Table, where you assign missions to your various knights. The biggest element is trying to match their personal quirks and strengths to the various tasks. Whether they enjoy or dislike their assignment impacts how they feel about you, too. Both romance and revolt are on the table.
The last part of each round is when you get some hard-earned rest, and your knights move around the map completing their tasks. You get an after-action report about each mission’s success or failure and many useful tidbits of intel. Then the cycle starts again.
More to Come
The demo I played was obviously just a preview of a more complete experience, but even so, hinted at some surprising depth. There are fail states where RNG and mismanagement lead to your potential demise or the ruin of your rule. There is also an intriguing mechanic where you can pull a Cher and turn back time and possibly revisit some bad decisions.
Visually, Sovereign Tower is built on graphic novel-type illustrations with occasional animations. The art and characters have a lot of personality. There is no voice acting, but the text is well-written, not overwrought, and often dryly funny. The content draws on familiar tropes we all know from fantasy literature, games and movies…with maybe a few historical references.
I had no idea what to expect from Sovereign Tower and came away impressed, entertained and intrigued. This is the best possible outcome for an unfamiliar game, and I’m always appreciative when developers make even a modest stab at something new. Sovereign Tower has a solid, wide-open premise that could support a huge number of scenarios. I’m excited to see how it develops as it moves closer to release in August.
***Code provided by the publisher for preview***
