Sovereign Tower Review
Wild Wits’ Arthurian-inspired Sovereign Tower is a kingdom management RPG with the character-driven storytelling of a visual novel.
Sovereign Tower. Credit: Wild Wits / Curve Games
Wild Wits’ Arthurian-inspired Sovereign Tower blends management RPG with visual novel, putting you on the throne of a magical tower. You listen to subjects’ requests and assign knights to handle them. Excellent writing gives you good reasons to care about your court beyond how useful your knights are.
Requests range from capturing a troublesome goose to quelling a rebellion in a neighboring kingdom. You weigh your knights’ abilities against the assignments at hand while managing your treasury and keeping your people satisfied. Unhappy knights can quit, so their grievances deserve attention alongside the kingdom’s problems. I became truly invested in these characters. Their personalities made me consider assignments more carefully than simply looking at stat numbers.
A demon in the crypt lets you turn back time and reconsider your decisions. I liked that it wasn’t a simple rewind; your character remembers what happened, opening new conversation options. It makes the system more interesting than just save-scumming, which I have a habit of doing. Still, I had to learn to accept some consequences. There isn’t always a “correct” choice. Choosing differently might avoid one negative result while creating another problem. Repeating tasks after a rewind adds some tedium, though that’s a minor quibble considering how good the system is otherwise.
Sovereign Tower. Credit: Wild Wits / Curve Games
Sovereign Tower. Credit: Wild Wits / Curve Games
The gorgeous line-art illustrations give the knights and their world distinctive designs. I also found the subdued color palette an unusual but wonderful choice. The art is so pretty that I can forgive the game’s mostly static presentation. Sovereign Tower isn’t strictly a visual novel, but it looks unlike other games in that genre.
Sovereign Tower is an easy recommendation for visual novel fans, particularly those looking for more than just narrative decisions. Spending time with the characters in their world is truly a pleasure, even with minor gameplay annoyances.
Sovereign Tower
Sovereign Tower is an easy recommendation for visual novel fans seeking more than dialogue choices, despite some tedium when retracing their decisions.
Wild Wits’ Arthurian-inspired Sovereign Tower is a kingdom management RPG with the character-driven storytelling of a visual novel.