Described by developers Wild Wits Games as a ‘management RPG’, Sovereign Tower is what you get when you take Yes, Your Grace and make it sexy.
Playing the role of the titular Sovereign, recently installed on the seat of an ancient and powerful throne, this is a game where a never-ending stream of peasants, nobles and axe-grinders visits you on a daily basis, asking you to solve, mediate or ignore their various issues.
While some of that solving comes from simply spending a bit of cash to fix up a road or whatever, many of the more serious issues–like monsters eating farmers’ cattle and angry Dragon Kings challenging you to duels–become quests, which require you to send out your roster of brave, shiny and slightly weird Knights to complete.
Each Knight has strengths, weaknesses and traits (some might be afraid of the dark!), and so you need to make sure you’re sending the right man, woman or undead-creature-pretending-to-be-something-else to do the job. Knights can take damage on these quests, uncover secrets that unlock further quests (with their own storylines) and even, if you really fuck it up, die.
That matters here, because each Knight is a rich and fully realised character. Every single one has a backstory, and dialogue sequences, and you can even romance them, so when you lose one, it hurts! Not just because you’ve spent ages levelling them up and equipping them with expensive gear, but because you might be in love with them.
A huge part of the Sovereign Tower experience is built around these interactions, to the point where you’d be forgiven for thinking this was more of a visual novel RPG than a management RPG. Nearly the entire game is spent talking to someone, whether a petitioner, castle attendant or Knight, and both the writing and art are so good I don’t think I let a single opportunity for conversation or a sidequest pass me by. Look at these menus! That map! It’s glorious! Every scene in the game is oozing with character and wonderful little touches.
It’s not all chit-chat, though. I saw the game describedin a Discord I’m in as “Sovereign Tower is basically just Suzerainwith an embodied character”, and that also checks out. Anyone who has played Suzerain, with its constant need for decisions of state to be made with sometimes little more than gut feeling to go on, will see that same pressure here within around five minutes, albeit with the added immersion that you’re a character actually existing in Sovereign Tower’s world, not just a disembodied, guiding hand.
There’s some depth to the management of your Knights, too; every day you need to juggle sending some out on missions, having others come back and making sure they’ve all got the right equipment (and maybe a cake or two for a stats boost). Once you’ve got a full roster itfeels a lot like Dispatch, only without the smarm; the cast here is so full of interesting and unique characters that I grew to love (nearly) all of them.
I know there are a lot of games coming out at this time of year, way too many for everyone to even keep track of, let alone play, but boy am I glad I carved a few days out for Sovereign Tower, which takes abstract worker management and makes it personal.
