Sovereign Tower Review – Royal Pain, Royal Gain

Sovereign Tower Review

Back in January, I previewed Sovereign Tower, best described as an RPG blended with a medieval management sim. Anyone who’s had to motivate difficult people, eccentric family members or uncooperative employees might relate (or get a PTSD flashback). Turns out, whether you’re a soverign or not, managing egotistical knights, horny blacksmiths and literal demons in the basement is a challenge.

Days and Knights

You play as newly minted, unexpected royalty, a leper who somehow stumbles into a magical prophecy and unlocks a literal key to the kingdom. As sovereign, your tasks are to recruit knights, placate the kingdom’s whiny citizens, and keep competing 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. I enjoyed meeting the ever-expanding cast of characters.

Your days are divided into a number of activities: holding an audience where you listen to people grovel, flatter, whine, complain or make demands; assigning knights to quests and taking care of business. This includes tasks such as buying new weapons for your knights or leveling up their attributes, hearing gossip or consulting you advisors.

 

Nearly every conversation offers multiple choices. Refuse to help a farmer and before you know it, you have a lot of unhappy, unproductive farmers to placate. Maybe you send a knight on a literal goose chase. Unfortunately, you neglected to note that the knight was phobic about waterfowl. Perhaps you decided your reign will be focused on making the commoners happy. The nobles will be pissed. On and on it goes, layers and layers deep. A fail state for a quest might be simple embarassment or loss of coin. Or it might send a knight into a self-recriminating meltdown or death. In many adventure games, it’s pretty obvious when a choice is “good” or “bad.” In Sovereign Tower, that’s rarely the case.

Time After Time

Since things in Sovereign Tower often go deeply south, the game gives you do-over in the form of a demon in the bowels of the castle. Said demon has a magic crystal that can turn back time and save you from yourself and your boneheaded choices. In this game’s version of time travel, though, your character doesn’t forget what happened or what they knew. So you might go back and make different choices but in doing so, you kill off the timeline and potentially positive connections or events from before the rewind. It’s a bit mind bendy, in a good way, and lots of fun to play with. Oh, and the demon is not your friend, and the time travel has other consquences not immediately revealed upfront.

I hope you’re beginning to sense that Sovereign Tower is significantly more densely constructed than its art and writing suggest. I say that because the illustrations are both charming and a little rough, like the love child of a medieval manuscript mated to a graphic novel. There’s no voice acting, but the writing is very good. If you enjoy anachronistic humor and modern sensibilities overlayed on medieval history, you’ll enjoy it. The biggest narrative negative is that Sovereign Tower sometimes struggles with tonal consistency. Some of the knights, nobles and commoners have sincerely troubling problems that can be hard to find emotionally affecting thanks to the humor around them.

Sovereign Tower might frustrate gamers who suffer from choice paralysis. There’s a lot to consider and sometimes critical information — like a knight’s attributes — can be hidden. Running back the clock might save a situation but it also means potentiall replaying a big chunk of game. Finally, once the engine is running, the loop can feel a little repetitive.

Knights in White Satin

After the preview in January, I came away impressed, entertained and intrigued. The full game has done nothing but deepen my appreciation for the game’s fresh approach to the management and RPG genres. Soverign Knights is charming, cheeky and challenging, with lots of depth and surprises in store at nearly every turn.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***