Text-based games, management RPGs, and visual novels – of whatever kind – rarely make the most exciting previews. It’s just not easy to build a rich interest in the world and characters of a story you can only get the slightest taste of. I’m very pleased to say that a few hours with Sovereign Tower broke that trend entirely.
Whosoever turns the key in the giant magic lock on the tower becomes king. So, as the mystically-appointed lord of the tower, your poor faceless wanderer becomes a very important person overnight in what developer Wild Wits calls a “story-rich, Round Table management RPG.” It’s an entertaining concept that draws its characters and dialogue equally from fantastical tradition and modern life. Couple that with a deliciously detailed art style and a sense of what’s most entertaining to do in both management games and visual novels.
That’s enough to sell it, I think, but it also has some nice surprises and a weird little twist on the genre as a whole. I had a pretty darn good time with it, and I’m looking forward to more.
King of the Castle
In each turn of Sovereign Tower, you have to do two things: accept audiences, then assign knights from your round table to various quests. Taking audiences is a simple concept: Sit on the throne and deal with problems people bring you. The decisions you make there can alter the path of the story, bring up new quests for your knights, or avoid problems. They’ll also affect the sovereign’s standing with the realm’s four factions: the Nobility, People, Merchants, and Scholars.
Some problems go away if you just throw money at them, and the taxes you get at the start of every cycle can pay for some of that—but those are the same taxes you use to pay for stuff like cool new swords and horses and magic potions, so do you really want to spend them on boring stuff like bridges or whatever? Probably not.
That sounds pretty normal, but it’s the weirdos that show up to need things from you or to join your kingdom that make it memorable. I encountered a stinky jester, proud emissaries unable to admit they couldn’t solve their own problems, clever peasants, annoying nobles, and even an assassin. Talking with them solidifies the personality of your blank-slate Sovereign, raising their stats in Audacity, Tyranny, Wisdom, and Kindness to unlock alternate decisions in future events.
The Knights are the flavor that’ll really have to carry the game, and from what I saw they might do it. I met a huge guy that acted like a child, a very fancy boy, an extremely overdramatic guy, a nice lady who loved forest critters, the most goth knight ever, and even a straight-up actual wolf. Each of them had their own unique little events and dialogue that popped up from time to time, each of which affected your sovereign’s relationship with them. They also had history to learn, as well as more straightforward stats, all of which affect their performance on missions.
Figuring out which knight would be best for each quest was an actually interesting choice. Equipment like a specific horse to ride, a sword to use, or a magic potion can give them temporary stat boosts, but it’s often the bonuses or penalties from their personality traits that make the difference between a failure and success or between mere success and an outstanding victory.
For example if you’re doing something that’s a bit of public relations? Probably should send the more charismatic knight, but not the really arrogant one. Watching each knight’s background and figuring out which of the little highlighted keywords apply to the current mission is a fun bit of understanding the characters.
And there’s a real penalty for failure. Your knights each have an armor score, which if it goes to zero means that knight’s, well, dead and gone. Your blacksmith can only fix one knight’s armor each cycle—so you need to be reasonably sure that the task you’re sending a knight on is one they can at least survive if they fail.
Shining Armor
None of the characters, nor the entire game as I saw it, would have nearly as much personality without the visual art on display in Sovereign Tower, and I’ve got to take a moment to run through the influences and elements that make it up. Starting with the simple choices of colors to draw from: The warm pastels, earth tones, and jewel tones are lovely, then they’re combined with copious golden shades and tints to express lighting. It’s a palette of colors that’s something between stained glass or rich watercolor on thick paper.
The characters are drawn with a lot of emotion and movement, too, for what are otherwise relatively flat portraits. You can feel the shrug in how Urusla stands, for example. You can see the carefree attitude in the angle of Angelica’s head. And, well, everything about Gideon tells you exactly who he is and how he behaves. It’s not just great illustration work in that you can feel the motion, it’s that you can immediately start to feel who the characters are just from how they look.
It’s clear that these are artists who understand how to work their chosen medium, and if you’ll put up with me for a nerd moment, it is deeply reminiscent of the Art Nouveau period in design from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Particularly the advertisements, posters, and calendars of justly-famous artist Alphonse Mucha. It’s a fitting choice, too: Mucha’s work often used the kind of medieval romantic and even fairytale themes that Sovereign Tower seems to use in its stories—I imagine he’d approve of being the inspiration here.
I think that’s where I’d place this whole game’s artistic style, too: It’s a blend of medieval fantasy and Arthurian romance setting, the art of Mucha, and the writing of a wryly clever modern comic book. There’s basically nothing to dislike in that.
The Clever Twist
It’s not a surprise to people who like this kind of game that there are going to be secret events and pathways through the story to uncover, as well as desperate outcomes and painful prices to pay when choosing poorly at certain decision points. I found that Sovereign Tower must have more than a few, since I managed to stumble into at least two hidden story outcomes while playing just by assigning an unexpected or suboptimal knight to a specific quest.
The frustration with these kinds of events, however, is that they can give you unwanted outcomes or change the story when you weren’t expecting them to or were aiming for another outcome. The only choice you’ve got at that point is often to play the entire visual novel over again just to see a new path or the immediate consequence of a tough choice.
The real good choice that Sovereign Tower makes is to have a built-in do-over mechanic. See, there’s a demon that lives in a cage in the tower basement, which I’m sure isn’t scary or plot-relevant at all because the demon helps you do something very useful: Step back in time. Don’t worry—the demon assures me this is because it has absolutely no bad intentions and is bound to help you—much like all the other magical things that live in the tower.
With the demon’s help you can turn back time, especially when some choice you’ve made would lead to a disastrous end. I expect you’ll also be able to use the power to avoid the worst ends in the game, and I’m betting most players will want to use it at least once or twice to avoid making whatever NPC they’ve chosen to romance not mad at them about something. There’s also the hint, given in the trailer and screenshots for Sovereign Tower, that you’ll be able to use the demon’s power to unlock alternate dialogue in situations you’ve seen before—tagged with an “Omniscience” stat that surely won’t upset or alarm people who don’t realize you’re time travelling.
Overall, from the art and the writing, I’m pretty intrigued by Sovereign Tower and it’s going on my list of games to watch out for. Sure, the game mechanics are pretty simple, but when the story and characters are interesting in this way I’m glad the game rules are getting out of the way to let me entertain myself—failing and succeeding on my own terms.
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