Our Verdict

One of the best management games around, featuring gaming's best implementation of time travel.

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What is it? A visual novel, RPG, management game with time travel. Release date August 6, 2026Expect to pay $17/£12.74Developer Wild Wit GamesPublisher Curve GamesReviewed on RTX 4090, Intel i9-13900k, 32GB RAMSteam Deck VerifiedLink Steam

Sovereign Tower is so much more than it seems—which feels rather appropriate for a game where you play an itinerant leper who accidentally becomes the ruler of a magical kingdom, the titular Sovereign. Nobody is quite sure what to make of you, especially if, like me, you start suggesting eating cats or recruit a literal wolf to join your Knights of the Roundtable.

At first glance this is a cosy visual novel management game with a soft colour palette and handsome art. You sit on your throne listening to requests, demands and grievances, and then you send out your growing gaggle of knights on quests in an attempt to keep everyone happy.

But Sovereign Tower quickly reveals itself to be a complicated juggling act where nearly everyone needs your help, and those who don't probably want to kill you. There are fires everywhere, and you'll never have enough knights to put them all out.

It takes some of the fundamentals of the excellent Reigns series, but stretches them out, filling the space with more elaborate storylines, surprisingly meaty roleplaying systems and, most importantly, time travel.

Time to kill

Time is the dreadful spectre looming over Sovereign Tower. Most quests can be completed whenever you want, or simply ignored, but each act features main quests and random emergency quests that must be tackled within an allotted timeframe. Sometimes these are also tied to the satisfaction level of the various classes of your citizenry—scholars, merchants, nobles and the people—or the wealth contained in your treasury.

So you'll need to send out your knights in time, and keep your people happy and your economy strong. That's easier said than done.

If you want to get more nobles on your side, you might have to piss off the merchants. If you want a full treasury, how are you going to pay for your knights' armour to be repaired, or equip them with expensive magical equipment and fast horses? And if you're too cheap, how are your knights going to succeed in their quests?

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Quests also challenge specific abilities—strength, agility, charisma, luck, magic and wit. You're not going to want to send a scrawny magical knight on a quest that involves lifting heavy objects. And your brawniest warrior might have a tricky time taking down a rogue necromancer.

Each adventure also contains certain keywords that relate to the attributes and preferences of your knights. Angelica, the first knight you'll recruit, loves animals. So if the quest involves killing a bunch of critters, she might not be your first choice. On the other hand, she might be the perfect choice, with her attribute allowing her to pacify the animals without bloodshed. Quests can have unexpected outcomes, which means that it's worth sometimes going with your gut and taking a risky punt.

Preferences work differently. One of Angelica's preferences is diplomacy, so if you send her to end a dispute between some druids and a mob of angry peasants, this will make her happy. She loves mediation (yes, she's a dork). Keep their satisfaction high and your knights will be loyal even as you make the worst possible decisions. Let it drop, however, and you might notice some empty spaces around the Roundtable.

There's one more wrinkle: you don't automatically get a full list of everyone's attributes and preferences. As the Sovereign you might have a lot of power, but that doesn't mean you immediately know everything about your employees. You'll need to hang out with them, then—spend a bit of time getting to know them. Or you can just get one of your advisors to spy on them.

Sovereign Tower manages to make what could have been disparate management, roleplaying and relationship systems feel incredibly cohesive—and crucially, fun to explore and exploit. Key to this is the fact that all your knights have a degree of agency that elevates them above mere pawns. They can surprise you on quests, or even come to you with alternative solutions to difficult problems.

It's exclusively thanks to one of my knights that we defeated an intimidating rival. He suggested we kidnap the guy's son to put him off his game. He's also the reason I got the option to assassinate a rebel leader instead of negotiating with her. And, off the record, that horse race I won? Where all the other competitors mysteriously died? Yeah, he might have had something to do with it.

OK, so your people dig you, you've got an enviable roster of talented knights, you're fabulously wealthy, that must be all you need to worry about, right? Sorry, no. Life is unfair.

Those time-sensitive quests I mentioned before will sometimes just appear out of the blue. A village is about to be destroyed by a flood! Send your knights to help in one turn! But, oh dear, all the knights who could save the day are already busy on a three-day adventure. I guess the village is going to become a water park.

Give me more time

It can often feel like you're only ever a few turns away from a daunting crisis. The murder of a knight, a betrayal, a kidnapping, a civil war—sometimes you'll be able to resolve them, sometimes you won't. Luckily, a lot of crises allow you to just carry on even if you don't find a solution. But you might not be happy with the results. And that's where time travel comes in.

Locked in a crypt in the bowels of your tower sits a magical artefact possessed by a powerful demon. Specifically, it has the power to turn back the clock—whenever you want. If, you know, you're cool with working with a demon who is maybe a little bit too enthusiastic about breaking the timeline.

The beauty of this time travel system is that the game acknowledges your foreknowledge constantly. New dialogue options and actions appear, allowing you to use what you learned in the now-defunct timeline to make changes big and small. There's a lot of "I know what you're going to say", which can result in some entertaining reactions, and it also means you get to skip a lot of exposition and dialogue you've already read before. But the big stuff is game changing.

You can thwart murders, end wars before they begin, unite warring factions, and simply make different decisions that completely change the character of your playthrough. But it's not as simple as just fixing all of your mistakes.

Sure, you probably don't want one of your knights to get murdered. But if you turn back time, then you're killing off all the possibilities that stemmed from that event—and some of them might have been positive. Fiddling with the timeline means you might never meet certain knights, or you might miss out on alliances or magical artefacts that would bolster your power considerably.

So you can ignore this tantalising power, letting the cards fall where they may, and just deal with the consequences. Developer Wild Wits has taken a big risk by letting you simply not engage with the game's strongest mechanic—but its confidence in the rest of its systems has paid off.

In my first playthrough, I only fiddled with time once. I was constantly being tempted, wrestling with these cosmic, ethical conundrums, so it's not like the time travel system ceases to have an impact just because you abstain. Even without mucking around with Sovereign Tower's big hook, I was still smitten.

The playful writing, eccentric characters and tense juggling act left me riveted. It's simply a great management game, visual novel and RPG.

Now, though, I am taking a leaf out of The Master's book, always asking myself what Doctor Who's archrival would do. At the end of my first playthrough, I opted to travel right back to the start, using my knowledge of the future to change everything. But even with this power, I can't always predict how the new paths will play out, prompting me to keep hopping back, over and over again, until the timeline is just right. For me, at least.

Playing Sovereign Tower has been a damn delight—the most fun I've had at my desk all year. And I fully intend to keep playing. I've got mistakes to fix, and an adorable wolf barking at me, wanting to bound off on another adventure.

Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He's also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he's not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog.