Videogame Review: ‘Sovereign Syndicate’

With the massive success of Disco Elysium a few years ago, I was awaiting a barrage of high-quality, morally twisted adventure games. This really never materialized, but Sovereign Syndicate takes a good stab at the game’s style. However, it falls short on polish and pacing.

Sovereign Syndicate is set in an alternate-reality London where centaurs, minotaurs, dwarves and other fantastical creatures mingle with humanity. Incorporating steampunk styles of design and technology, it’s a complex and interesting world that had me intrigued for the first few hours of playtime.

The game starts, interestingly enough, in a similar fashion to Disco Elysium: A perpetually drunk and high minotaur named Atticus Daley wakes up and tries to sort out his life. Through the first segment with Atticus the game systems start to cement into place.

Atticus is a magician, which is nice as generally a large creature would be a brawler. He sets out to clean up his act (or sink lower into drugs and alcohol) and gets embroiled in a deeper plot and mystery. The game introduces the morality system through initial dialogues, which reward certain traits based on actions and responses.

Much like the game that inspired it there are plenty of internal monologues as the characters, three in total, make choices or talk to the denizens of London. This adds odd perks, like +1 bile, +1 blood or -5 hope, that don’t really make a lot of sense, but add to levels of certain attributes.

At key moments there will be skills-based conversation or actions, decided with a tarot card draw and your pertinent skill. If the card and skill beat the challenge rating, the favorable outcome happens. Often failing still enables success, albeit in a challenging or detrimental way.

Because Sovereign Syndicate is an adventure game there is a lot of reading between story beats, conversations, internal monologues and lore. The writing ranges from outstanding to muddled, so it does ebb and flow. Overall the experience is good, but expect to read page after page of exposition during the game.

The structure of the game has the characters switching every chapter, which is how we get to meet Clara Reed and Teddy Redgrave (and his automaton Otto). Once they are introduced, the game splinters as three stories start to unfold, separate but parallel and woven together.

The big issue I had with the game was that as each chapter progresses the three characters revisit locations over and over to get new clues or story beats or run into each other. There are a bunch of different zones, and there is a fast travel system, but it still felt like a slog going back and forth over and over again.

The story hinges on an overarching mystery that each character gets pulled into while trying to solve their own personal problems. This works pretty well at times, but I felt that sometimes I wanted to keep pulling on one thread longer than the game let me before switching to another character.

Visually the game has a lovely art style held back by a rough technical implementation, with some tearing, and no ability to move the camera, which got in the way a number of times. There is no voice acting (which makes sense considering how text-heavy it is). The music and effects are lovely if basic most of the time.

Overall Sovereign Syndicate kept me intrigued as I played it, but I kept wishing for a little more. More refinement, more control over the characters, more depth from their stories and more agency in how I play through the game.

We were provided a Steam key by the publisher for review purposes. Sovereign Syndicate will be available January 15 for PC via Steam.