In most medieval fantasy stories, you’d play as a dashing hero or capable damsel, coming from humble beginnings to aspire to greatness over the course of the narrative. In Sovereign Tower, from Wild Wits, you begin as a leper, ostracized by a community that is swiftly destroyed in an event that fast tracks your origin story from lowly diseased outcast to the True Sovereign, when your birthright is revealed in a Sword in the Stone type moment in the first fifteen minutes.
What follows is a kingdom management sim that feels distinctly like Yes, Your Grace but with a few notable changes. For a start, there’s more of a focus on the knights of your particularly well-tarnished round table, as well as the usual slew of peasants, merchants, lordlings, and rivals to deal with.
Sovereign Tower breaks the game into cycles (days, by any other name), which will see you meeting with a line of visitors who all want something. They may be requesting aid, offering you some rare trinket, begging for money, or threatening your position. How you respond is what steers the game, though the main narrative cuts its own path right through all the bureaucracy.
See, while you’re dealing with stolen cattle or grain shortages, you’re also dealing with a ticking clock mechanic as the ancient evil that defeated your predecessor is lurking in the background. Right away you’re approached by a former servant of the previous ruler and given a set number of cycles to complete a task, and failure has dire consequences.
So you set about trying to put things right in your kingdom while preparing for your inevitable showdown. This mostly means recruiting knights who come to you seeking fame or glory. Like last year’s stellar Dispatch, each of your knights has a stat wheel presenting the personality traits they are strong or week in. Wits, Strength, and Agility for example. When you assign these knights to deal with issues in the kingdom, you need to determine who is bets for the role – though you’ll never be able to see all the required or active stats; there will always be question marks that give you pause.
Success rewards you with resources for your coffers, while failure damages the armour of the knight which you’ll need to pay to repair or you’ll find them out of commission. But you’ll often be approached by craftsmen and merchants who can install rooms in the castle. The first is the forge, where you repair your knights’ equipment. From the castle hub you can also check the map room, or head upstairs to where a sentient statue will help you govern and flirt like hell with you.
There’s an air of old school silliness to Sovereign Tower that doesn’t quite lean heavily enough into comedy for me. Occasional throwaway lines or certain knights having quite hilarious personalities notwithstanding, it never really hits the heights I feel it could achieve. Although this is only a demo, and the full game may be slightly more fleshed out.
It is quite compelling though, partly because it’s so unpredictable. You never quite know who’s going to appear in the throne room the next morning, you never know if a knight is going to succeed or fail, and of course you never know if you’re really doing the right thing or why some ancient destructive force wants you so very dead.
Combining elements of Dispatch with Yes, Your Grace makes for an enjoyable experience in so far as the demo can show. I chuckled a few times and swore a few times, and rued the odd decision, which I feel is crucial to the vibe. But it could pick a tone and stick to it, as it wobbles between a bit silly and straight-up po-faced just a bit too much for my taste. That said, what I played is an interesting and charming little slice of kingdom management with a dose of point and click strategy thrown in.
Sovereign Tower is scheduled to release on August 6 2026 on Steam. You can play the demo now.
