Sovereign Tower has genuinely surprised me. At first glance, it’s a cosy-looking management romp with shades of Reigns and Yes, Your Grace. It’s colourful, a little silly and chock-full of charming eccentrics. This is not an inaccurate assessment, but it’s also so much more—and a lot darker than the soft colour palette and whimsical tone initially suggests.
After opening the door to a magic tower, you become the Sovereign, the leader of a nation and a big player on the international stage. Yesterday, you were an itinerant leper. Now you’re the boss. What are your credentials? Who cares? You’ve got destiny on your side.
Take the reigns
Each day follows the same broad loop, where you’ll hold an audience with commoners, diplomats and your fellow rulers, dole out decrees and advice, and then send your knights on quests—typically given to you during the audience phase—all around the world.
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The choices you make determine what the rest of the world thinks of you, from your knights to your citizens, who are split into merchants, scholars, nobles and “people”, who I guess are just everyone else.
Every quest will challenge a specific set of abilities—strength, agility, charisma, luck, magic and wit—only a few of which will be revealed to you. If a manticore hunt demands a strong sword arm, you send your strongest knights—simple! But not quite. See, each knight has a list of positive and negative attributes, like a love of water or a fear of crowds, which can raise or lower their chance of success at a given quest.
These attributes are initially invisible, requiring you to get to know them, or to send one of your advisors to spy on them. The same goes for their preferences, which don’t impact the quests themselves, but will affect their satisfaction level.
If you send someone who’s afraid of the dark and hates to hunt into a gloomy forest to kill some wolves, there’s a good chance they’ll fail the quest and think you’re a bit of a dick. But you can still make them try, anyway, and if you buff their abilities with the right gear, they might succeed despite all of the obstacles.
So the management side of things is surprisingly dense due to the way it works in tandem with this pretty full-featured RPG system. This could have easily been Sovereign Tower’s big hook, but it’s actually one of two, and its companion is what really makes the game properly impressive.
Time crime
Deep inside the bowels of the tower sits an artefact inhabited by a demon. This demon has a pretty neat party trick: it can turn back time. And it’s very eager for you to use this power. Convenient? Absolutely. Suspicious? Oh yeah.
Here’s the deal: if you’re not happy with the outcome of a quest, decision or scripted moment, you can turn back the clock. This is of course handy if you’ve opted not to allow for manual saving, but this power goes well beyond an in-fiction way to savescum.
See, when you go back in time, your character retains everything they’ve learned in the now-defunct timeline. This means you can not only take a different path, entirely new options open up for you that reflect your knowledge of the future.
Say one of your knights gets killed off—not dying valiantly during a quest, but cowardly murdered in the tower. And through another knight’s investigation, you discover who the culprit is, and why they did it. Well, now you have everything you need to go back in time to stop it from happening.
But should you?
You’re not just thwarting a murder, you’re killing off a timeline, and all the events that resulted from that crime. Maybe some of them are even positive. You could bring back some characters while losing access to others. And who’s to say that the best timeline is the one where this knight lives?
Killing time
Aside from all that, there’s the big conundrum at the heart of Sovereign Tower: should you really be making deals with a demon? Especially a demon who is so desperate for you to use this power. Well, I ain’t telling.
You can stick to your guns and prove you’ve learned things from so many other time travel stories, refusing to engage with this system. And should you do that, you’ll still have fun. Sovereign Tower is an excellent RPG/management game/visual novel hydra. But the temptation to meddle is so damn tempting.
This tension might be the game’s most potent feature. The ethical, existential crisis that results from the discovery of time travel is a big part of the genre, but it’s something few games really tackle. Sure, they might pay lip service to it, but as players we never really need to grapple with it.
Sovereign Tower, meanwhile, never stops testing you. Whenever a big decision is made, whenever something goes wrong, whenever you reach a milestone—the demon is always there, whispering in your ear: “Could you have done something differently?” And the answer is always “Yes”. But do you act on that knowledge?
I’ve been roleplaying as a pretty rotten monarch. I’ve allowed whole towns to drown, I’m rude to peasants and diplomats alike, and I regularly send my most ruthless knight to steal, murder and cheat. My kingdom won an international horse race because we poisoned all the other riders. I suck. But I still agonise over the choice to turn back time.
It’s a testament to the writing and the game’s memorable cast of weirdos. This is not an abstract choice. The world and its inhabitants feel tangible, and eradicating a timeline is a weighty decision. I know I can gain a lot by making changes, but what will I lose?
I love that I’m wrestling with these questions. And as I’m still playing through Sovereign Tower, I don’t yet have any answers. This might be the best part of the experience. I don’t want to learn that there’s a correct path—though I suspect it won’t end up being that black or white.
Sovereign Tower launches tomorrow, on August 6, and while I unfortunately won’t have a scored review up in time for its arrival—it’s technically a short game, but it’s greatly extended by time travel shenanigans—I’m already clearly smitten. If you want to wait for a score, however, come back in a couple of days for my full review. In the meantime, Sovereign Tower’s Steam demo is still available, letting you play up to the end of the first main quest.
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