// PC GAMER — GAMING
Sovereign Tower looks like a cosy management game, but it's ruthless, full of murder and impossible choices, and features one of the best time travel systems I've ever encountered
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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.
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.
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.
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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.