There are certain tropes in certain segments of creative works which are so expected, they’re practically stereotypes. Batman’s parents always die in Crime Alley. People reading The Necronomicon always go insane. And there is always some crazed lunatic killing off prostitutes in Victorian England in particularly gruesome ways. When it’s handled right, the morbid interest in Jack The Ripper and the Whitechapel murders can make for a potentially interesting story, or at least a potentially interesting backdrop to a story. Sovereign Syndicate, however, does not handle it right.
Sovereign Syndicate takes place in a very alternate version of Victorian Era London. Dwarves, cyclopses, centaurs, and minotaurs mingle with ordinary humans among steam-powered carriages, fighting automatons, monorails, decadent dirigibles, and robot pigeons delivering the mail. It’s a world where Britain won the Opium Wars, but lost the Anglo-Zulu Wars, leading to “Zululand” taking up a good chunk of southern Africa. A world where an expedition to Atlantis brought forth the steam technology that currently powers the British Empire. In other words, it’s utterly bonkers, and that’s before the opium and absinthe show up. You shift perspective every chapter, going between one of three characters. Atticus Daley, a gin-soaked and opium-addled minotaur, wakes up to find himself being accosted by a masked stranger on a mysterious errand. Clara Reed, a dollymop and former pickpocket, is trying to get out of London to avoid a bounty on her head from being claimed. Teddy Redgrave, a dwarf monster hunter with a homemade automaton and jury rigged prosthetics, is staring down an eviction notice. All three of these characters will cross paths and affect the streets of London for each other as their storylines intertwine, each potentially holding different pieces of the same great puzzle.
Visually speaking, Sovereign Syndicate does a decent job establishing small sections of London with a great deal of narrative consistency. You as a player can find your way around and quickly pick up where all the “hotspots” are. The areas certainly call to mind a steampunk-style London, with the emphasis on “London,” pretty much as it should be. The steampunk elements are present but for the most part they’re not overdone. This same restraint applies to character designs. Just the right amount of brass and gears to accentuate without being obnoxious about it. One of my big complaints from the demo back in the summer of 2022 was that it felt like a mod of Disco Elysium, at least on the user interface front, and the developers have made some changes to alleviate that. Much like the overall visual design, it’s toned down the steampunk cues to something more subtle. At the same time, it’s also clear that the developers have changed entire mechanics from the earlier iterations. Periodically, you’re treated to motion comic-style cutscenes, and they certainly keep the general visual style even as the line work is perhaps a little more simplified, less detailed to help speed the story along.
The audio elements of Sovereign Syndicate are, bluntly, a terrible disappointment. There’s a dearth of good music in the game, basically the same few themes playing on an endless loop without any variation. Even mixing in a character leitmotif for each chapter would have been a decent improvement. There’s literally a musical number during one of the chapters which certainly breaks up the monotony, but only makes going back to the endless exploration music loops that much more disappointing. Voice acting is sparse, and what does show up doesn’t exactly excel. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t do anything to help establish or strengthen characters. Sound effects do a lot of heavy lifting, and even these aren’t as effective as they could be. They don’t help immerse the player in the environment, much less the storyline, and that’s a deep disappointment.
While the user interface has moved somewhat from its “Disco Elysium knockoff” roots, the actual gameplay in Sovereign Syndicate hasn’t appreciably changed from its demo days. You’re still relying on a Tarot-based system for various skill checks, and it’s still just as swingy as it was during the demo. Moreso, in some places. You’re just as likely to go blind trying to correlate difficulty percentages to target numbers for skill checks as you are to have a perfect run. If anything, it feels the RNG is weighted more towards failure than success unless you’ve built up your stats. Of course, now with three characters, the stats has their own distinct nomenclature for each character, leading to a bit of confusion as each chapter shifts as to which stat corresponds to which “humor.” The “vigour” and “nerve” mechanisms have been ditched in favor a single catch-all “temperament” scale. Conversation choices can incorporate one of the humors, and picking it will give you a bump in that particular humor, or it could have a temperament threshold which blocks off certain choices depending on your point on that scale. Of course, there’s always the chance that you’ll pick a conversation option which will shift your temperament. They’re usually pretty obvious if you read the text carefully, but the effects of the temperament scale are completely opaque outside of the general “this is your overall mood.” It’s a system which makes you a player question why it’s there in the first place. What benefit is there to having a bad mood over a pleasant one? We’re never given an answer to that.
We’re also never given an answer to what conditions are required to unlock the Major Arcana which are used to provide different options in conversations and skill checks. Worse, there doesn’t seem to be any particular bonus when making a check with a Major Arcana trait. It’s a system which ultimately looks cool but isn’t particularly accessible outside of repeated playthroughs and brute forcing the combinations needed. And the incentive to play through again doesn’t seem to exist other than for the most anal-retentive of players.
Narratively, Sovereign Syndicate is trying to establish an air of mystery with a frosting of urban fantasy, and it completely fails to land. There’s a lot of wild worldbuilding on display, and the attention to detail in providing Victorian street argot alongside non-English languages (along with helpful translations for those who haven’t heard the terms before) is commendable. Unfortunately, we’ve got no real attachment to any of the characters, main, secondary, or minor. The pacing of the chapters is much too short, even if you’re deliberately trying to draw things out by wandering around. There’s an extra level of aggravation when you pick an option to move from one area to another and it ends the chapter entirely. It wouldn’t have cost a lot of sweat to put a slightly different message to let players know, “End of Chapter X.” But that was apparently too much of an ask. The constant shifting of viewpoint characters from chapter to chapter doesn’t seem to work as well as it should. Some chapters, the shift makes sense, but others feel completely nonsensical.
Adding to this, the quest system doesn’t really make a great effort at differentiating between which ones will have to be continued in a different chapter and which ones need to be solved in the present chapter. And the final insult: because there’s no attachment to the characters, there’s no investment in the storylines. We’ve got these quest lines, but we’ve got no real drive to follow them to their conclusions. Because none of these characters stand out enough for us to give a damn. There’s nothing novel here. How badly do you have to fail to make Jack The Ripper (whatever their name might be in your world) uninteresting? What sort of bad choices in narrative and game design do you have to make such that the fictional counterparts of Whitechapel’s “poor unfortunates” don’t capture our interest? We have our answer right here. I wish we didn’t.
It’s been about a year and a half since the demo, and Sovereign Syndicate has failed to deliver on the promise it desperately shouted it had. I’d hoped this game would manage to find its voice and create a compelling story that grabbed players by the throat, pulling us along streets filled with gaslight and steam towards a powerful finale. Instead, it’s a title far too in love with all the fiddly bits in the background to bother giving players something in the moment. There’s better games out there to spend your dosh on.
Axel reviewed Sovereign Syndicate on PC with a review code.
