The first question you’re asked in Sovereign Tower is whether or not you want to activate the titular mode. If you opt to play with Sovereign on, manual saving is disabled by default. This means that you’re confident with the outcomes of your decisions. You’re forced to live with the consequences of your actions and endure whatever comes after – unless you accept the help of the demon inside the castle’s crypt, who promises you the ability to turn back time and try again.
I opted for the suggested challenge, and I’m glad I did, because that’s exactly where Sovereign Tower thrives. There are many decisions to make as the ruler of the enigmatic tower, where you host a round table of largely loyal knights at your command. Your actions affect the lives of your subordinates, as well as everyone from the nobles to the working class. Moreover, each choice builds up to have a direct impact on the entire realm and its many counties. And, ultimately, they can all catch you and compromise your own safety.
In this story-driven management RPG, your story begins in the midst of an invasion. Your home and your neighbors’ are all set ablaze. After years of relative peace, the Empire is attempting an invasion, and your home is part of the casualties. Barely managing to survive, you stumble upon a tower where the last sovereign used to reside. 100 years later, following an arduous search for his successor, you come along. To the surprise of the people gathered at the front door, you’re able to actually use the key to open its doors, basking in all the glory.
Now, with the help of a very eager advisor, you get to relive the glory of the second half of Fable 3, fielding requests from people all across the realm. Help with exorcisms. Help to slay a dragon, or help them to recover their lost egg. Help to carry out assassination plots to win the loyalty of a county. The list goes on and on, with some tasks veering on the absolutely absurd, and others requiring you to employ the help of your Round Table.
In Sovereign Tower, you’ll have audiences with all sorts of characters – each of them with a particular, easily discernible personality, as well as some gorgeous portraits to boot, which kept on surprising me even after several hours in their sheer variety and genius. Some of these characters will also offer their services as a knight. Bring them along, and you’ll get to shape them.
In a similar fashion to last year’s Dispatch from AdHoc Studio, each one of your knights has their own aptitudes and skills by default. Some excel in agility, others in wit or charisma. Each quest you take on will present you with a list of requirements, which often include the skills needed for the job, how high each skill must be, and some particular conditions. For example, some missions might require someone who’s not afraid of getting their hands dirty, or someone who can be discreet to carry out an illegal operation. Sure, you will need a noble, charismatic knight from time to time. But quests aren’t always that simple.
As your knights take on missions, they’ll gain experience and level up, allowing you to spend points on any stats of your choice. You can further increase the aptitudes they have some advantage on, or start reshaping them as you see fit. As you make progress in the story, you’re able to equip them with items that further enhance their stats. On top of all of this, a noteworthy feature is the attributes mechanic, which is yet another way in which each knight distinguishes themselves from the rest.
Some knights might prefer you not to send them on an assassination job, while others might have their own favorite activities. Learning these attributes and keeping them in mind when assigning characters to quests is crucial – it’s not just stats, but every other condition in play that can play a big part in whether you fail or succeed in a mission. Attributes themselves don’t dictate how a knight will perform in a quest, which means that, potentially, you can also ignore any negative impact and get knights to actively dislike you. The problem is, if their affinity level drops down enough, they’ll simply part ways from the Round Table altogether.
The most intriguing aspect about attributes is that you don’t have access to them by default. You may see one or two, but in order to get the full list and really know a character, you have to go through one of your tower’s facilities and ask your staff to investigate a specific knight. They’ll then unlock an attribute for you, and you can repeat this as many times as you want. There isn’t a cost to it – yet; everything in Sovereign Tower takes time. And, as you gradually learn, time is everything in this realm.
As a choice-based adventure with a clear RPG influence, I was expecting to find similarities to the likes of Bioware or Telltale Games. What I wasn’t expecting was a strong series of cues from the modern entries in the Persona series, and specifically from Metaphor: ReFantazio by Studio Zero. From the overview map of the realm to some of the UI styling and animations, the influence is clear. Yet, the biggest similarity comes with the daily schedule and how you make use of it.
In essence, each day in Sovereign Tower is its own cycle. It usually goes like this: you start your morning by fielding audiences, which are usually a handful of people with requests, updates, and quests, and you then spend the afternoon preparing your knights to, once you’re ready, dispatch them to their quests. These tasks take a specific number of days, or cycles, to complete, and some of the most important ones also have a deadline. Fail to dispatch knights before the due date, and you’ll instantly lose the quest.
There are bigger deadlines, too, with main objectives of sorts. These usually involve a major confrontation, for which you’ll be recommended to have a specific amount of support from classes, funds, and the number of allied counties. These aren’t mandatory, but they are encouraged, as otherwise your chances of succeeding will be low. Speaking from experience, the first time I attempted one of these deadlines, I severely underestimated the challenge. I lost five knights at once, a cost I simply couldn’t afford.
That was the moment in which I, albeit reluctantly, accepted the help from the demon living in the crypt. From the get-go, this being offers you the chance to return to any previous cycle, no questions asked. Doing so grants you the possibility to retry certain quests and conversations, but the interesting factor is that the protagonist remembers everything that transpired. When making certain decisions and in dialogue, you’re offered new options that acknowledge this, turning situations around. It’s an extremely powerful tool, and a great mechanic to boot.
During my time with Sovereign Tower, I was constantly surprised by the way everything gels together. My playtime sessions would often span hours, rather than just doing a few in-game cycles and calling it a day. Meeting new characters and getting to know my own group of knights closely never stopped being enticing. The experience as a whole wasn’t without drawbacks, however: the writing can be inconsistent, with typos being frequent, some sentences seemingly being incomplete, and the tone clashing with itself more often than I would have liked, jumping from evocative prose to almost Twitter-style speech back and forth. Then, when it came to characters, I wasn’t entirely sold on the romance aspect of the game. In short, you can flirt with most of the tower staff that aids you, as well as your knights. Some romance pathways seemed more fitting than others, but having literally everyone be willing to give you starry eyes just felt off, especially when the options are always present even if you haven’t initiated the romance in your early interactions.
Despite my gripes with it, Sovereign Tower is creatively inventive, putting a spin on multiple influences to create a solid and ever-surprising foundation.
