Sovereign Tower

Imagine Dispatch, but take away the superheroes, the modern metropolis, the computers and the headset, and replace it all with an ancient kingdom, a round table with a bunch of knights, and about a thousand billion times greater risk of someone being impaled with a sword or having their skull smashed in with a mace. There you have Sovereign Tower, more or less. It's basically the same idea: I'm sitting behind the scenes, trying to put the right person in the right place whilst at the same time getting to know the people around me, with the difference that this isn't about sending out superheroes to stop a bank robbery but about sending a knight who's terrified of water to cross a river, which is roughly equivalent to putting a pilot who's terrified of flying on a long-haul flight and then being surprised when the working environment turns out to be a bit problematic.

The story begins with me, as a newly crowned and not particularly experienced ruler, being handed a kingdom that already seems to have more problems than a single person could reasonably be expected to handle. There are political intrigues, conflicts, power struggles, peculiar characters and quite a few people who seem to have rather strong opinions on how I should go about my job - which is pretty much what you'd expect when you become king without first having attended any sort of induction course. Gathering around me are knights, noblemen, magicians, assassins and other more or less trustworthy individuals, all with their own stories, relationships and little personal quirks. What initially feels like a fairly light-hearted tale of trying to bring order to a kingdom gradually begins to evolve into something darker, where loyalty, betrayal, power and the consequences of my decisions take on ever greater significance. And it is through these audiences that much of this is revealed, where one moment I'm sitting listening to a peasant with problems, and the next I'm face to face with an assassin or a monstrous king wielding a sword that looks as though it weighs about as much as a small family car.

The introduction to Sovereign Tower teaches you a thing or two about the history of the kingdom.

Sovereign Tower is actually quite a strange game, but in a way that makes me like it. It's a role-playing game, a management sim and a story-driven adventure all rolled into one, and I play the part of a sort of medieval dispatcher, with the knights gathered round my table, waiting for me to decide who's going to do what. That might not sound particularly exciting, and if someone had described the game to me as "you're the king and you draw up schedules for knights," I'd probably have nodded politely and then started thinking about something else. But it works, largely because the knights actually feel like people and not just numbers in armour. I get to know them, understand what they're good at, what they're bad at and, above all, who they are, and pretty soon I start making decisions based on who I actually want to send out rather than who happens to have the highest stats.

This is also where the comparison with Dispatch becomes most apparent. I can, of course, play Sovereign Tower as a traditional management game and sit staring at statistics to try and create the perfect group, but then I'd be missing out on much of what makes the game fun. Because once I start getting to know the knights, their characteristics become far more interesting than a few bars on the screen. I know who's going to complain, who'll get furious if I give him the wrong mission, who'll avoid certain situations at all costs, and who's likely to return from his adventure with half his body left and a story that takes longer to tell than the mission itself took to complete. It's a bit like being the boss of a very poorly organised workplace where all the employees wear armour and have access to swords.

You'll get to meet a very diverse range of characters during the audiences you hold.

It also means that failures can actually be felt. When a knight fails, it's not just a number going down, and it's not just a quest I need to redo. It's a person I've spent time with, someone whose relationships with the others I've begun to understand, and someone I actually want to come home. What's more, Sovereign Tower looks as though it ought to be far kinder than it actually is. The hand-drawn aesthetic, the colourful characters and the general fairy-tale feel make the world seem almost cosy, but behind all that lie murders, disasters, betrayal and decisions where it sometimes feels as though all the options are bad, and that my job as king mostly involves choosing which problem I'd rather have. I can sit and watch a cute little cartoon knight and think: "We'll probably send him off on a nice little adventure," only to realise a few minutes later that I've effectively sent him straight to his death.

Then there's time travel, which makes everything even more interesting. When I get the chance to turn back time, the situation changes quite drastically, as it's not just a standard reset after I've messed up. I carry the knowledge from the previous timeline with me and can try to change what happens. I know what's going to happen whilst everyone else is still blissfully unaware, which creates a rather special feeling. It's a bit like having watched an episode of a TV series in advance and then sitting there trying to stop a character from opening that door which I already know leads to utter disaster. The difference is that this time I can actually do something about it, even if it's rarely as simple as just pointing at the right person and saying "don't go there."

You should handle this little rascal with care.

There's also a little demon at the very bottom of the big white tower who's in charge of this whole time-travel business, which is a pretty clear sign that I probably shouldn't be getting involved in this. It feels a bit like signing a pact with the devil every time I turn back time, and it also seems as though some of the game's characters are starting to realise that something is amiss. There are people who react to me in a way that suggests they know more than they ought to, and that gives the time travel a much greater significance than if it had just been a standard "undo" button.

At the same time, I do feel that Sovereign Tower sometimes makes life a bit unnecessarily difficult. Some quests can be rather vague, and at times it feels more like I'm supposed to guess what the developers are thinking rather than actually solving a problem. That might well suit a game where a lot of it is about learning how the world works, but there's a fine line between feeling clever because you've managed to understand the system and feeling clever because you just happened to press the right button. I want to feel like I've cracked the code, not that I've thrown three darts at the wall and just happened to hit the right one.

But when Sovereign Tower is at its best, it's very easy to overlook those issues. The dialogue is often funny, the cast of characters delightfully quirky, and the blend of management, role-playing and storytelling works better than I'd expected. There's a genuine desire here to make me actually get to know the people I'm working with, rather than just optimising them, and that's precisely why Dispatch feels like the obvious comparison. This is Dispatch set in the age of chivalry, quite simply, albeit with a worse working environment, considerably more swords and an employer who clearly thinks that 'high risk of death' is a perfectly reasonable part of the job description.

On this screen, you can see your knights riding out on missions and either returning with the banner held high or, if things go completely pear-shaped, being carried back in a coffin.

Sovereign Tower isn't perfect. Some systems could have been explained better, some missions feel less well thought-out than others, and sometimes I get the feeling that the game is holding back information that I'd have liked to have access to as well. But its charm more than makes up for it. It's clever, fun and, above all, very easy to get hooked on; and I went in expecting to play a minor management game with fantasy elements, only to end up actually caring about a bunch of medieval fools whom I'd sent out myself to solve problems that, in many cases, I could probably have avoided if I'd just thought for about three seconds. That's probably the best praise I can give Sovereign Tower. It's a game that manages to make me care about people who don't actually exist, whilst at the same time making me feel like the world's worst boss. And in some strange way, it's very entertaining.