“Sovereign Syndicate”: A Promising Debut with Room for Improvement
Sovereign Syndicate, the debut game by Crimson Herring Studios, invites players into an immersive alternative reality, blending elements of Victorian England with fantasy and steampunk. The game captivates with its beautiful artwork and gorgeous writing, drawing players into a rich world filled with lore and history. Although there are vast improvements that can be made to the game system design, Sovereign Syndicate is a promising start to Crimson Herring Studios, and I’m looking forward to seeing what more they can put out.
I’d seen some excitement about Sovereign Syndicate and managed to get it during a Steam Sale. What drew me in initially was that it was seen as sort of a spiritual successor to Disco Elysium, a ground-breaking dialogue-based RPG by ZA/UM. Likely, we’ll never see a true sequel to Disco Elysium, after controversy at ZA/UM, so I was looking forward to seeing how Sovereign Syndicate took the dialogue-based genre forward. What I found was a game that built off the strong foundations of Disco Elysium and tried to create its own riffs, to varying degrees of success.
Bewitching narratives and world-building
Sovereign Syndicate’s strengths lie in its comprehensive and detailed world-building. It’s not easy to bring so many elements together, but Sovereign Syndicate managed to achieve some form of knitted cohesion. The writers were ambitious, bringing alternative history, fantasy, steampunk, and Victorian England into one narrative. It’s admirable that none of the elements got lost in this cacophony of influences, and they all added their strand of flavor to the game world.
Small details are thought through, and there are deep backstories behind each nugget of fact that appears throughout the game. From the history of magical creatures in human society to the different cultures and nations that present a vision of what our real world could have been, there are many layers to dig through. I enjoyed hovering over the little links to see the different bits of fact that helped pull me deeper into the world of Sovereign Syndicate.
I appreciated how the writers explored issues of racism and discrimination through the different magical creatures in the game. From how Silas Bragg is motivated to uplift the image of his fellow Cyclops, to the segregation of werewolves, akin to infectious diseases, these elements were used effectively to illustrate a deep narrative world. I can feel how Crimson Herring must have put their heart and soul into building the Sovereign Syndicate universe.
Complex systems that weren’t easily understood and underused
While there is much to laud about the narrative elements of the game, there were in-game systems that could have used improvement.
I didn’t understand the tarot card system that the game used for overcoming dialogue challenges. Or rather, I think I understood it differently from how the game designers had meant for it to be used. It was intriguing at first — trying to figure out what all the tarot arcana meant, and how that tied into my character archetype. Unfortunately, I ended up treating it like just a dice roll. Maybe it’s because my mental model for this is based on what I’m used to in Disco Elysium, as well as Baldur’s Gate, which uses the DnD dice system. I ended up just relying on the percentage chance of success when choosing my dialogue choices.
I only learned more about the tarot system after watching a GameBanshee interview with Isaac Otway, where he talked about how it worked and also brought up that there’s also a deck reshuffle kind of concept, which I completely missed/forgot about in the game. Playing through the game again, I realized there was an onboarding element that introduced it, but besides that, it wasn’t clear to me at all. Maybe it's also because gameplay-wise, Sovereign Syndicate is so similar to Disco Elysium, so my mental model was fixed on how Disco Elysium handled these kinds of interactions. Given that the tarot system is a new mode of interacting within the dialogue-based RPG genre, it could have been made more consistently clearer.
Another thing that struck me was that I only opened up the inventory in chapter 10. Up till then, I hadn't seen any relevance at all, seeing that items I used are “usable” through the dialogue anyway. In fact, I misclicked and opened up the inventory on accident. It was only then that I realized that there were consumables that I could use, to add to my mood, or to add to my humors (what the game uses as a form of experience points). Besides that, was there any utility or flavor that the inventory could provide? Maybe there could have been some form of “equipping” in-game, or maybe you should be encouraged to consume some items before certain encounters. Otherwise, it feels like a waste to have the feature in-game without it being used.
Moving between chapters also took some getting used to. What irritated me was that I wasn’t always sure when I would move on to the next chapter. There were text prompts to “make sure you’ve done everything” before moving between some map areas, but this was used inconsistently. Sometimes, it’s before a chapter changes, while other times, it’s just before you leave a random map. I felt like it added unnecessary stress in a couple of ways. Firstly, there’s the stress of figuring out if “oh shit I can’t come back did I do everything”, only to realize that it wasn't a chapter change at all. Other times, it IS a sudden chapter change and you’re like “crap, there was something else I wanted to explore”.
Multi-chapter missions could also be confusing at times. It would have helped if some mission descriptions could be made clearer that they could only be completed later in the game. There was a mission where you’re supposed to find someone, and I was feeling rather frustrated at not being able to find him. Eventually, I realized that he only appears later in the game, after a few chapters. Could there have been a clearer indicator of time in the mission description, or maybe some hint? That would have prevented me from spending a good 10–20 mins running around the map trying to find this person who wasn’t there yet.
Despite janky systems, still an enjoyable play.
All that being said, I enjoyed the perspectives of the multiple characters that you can play within Sovereign Syndicate. It gave a different taste to what the underbelly of steampunk fantasy Victorian London is like and also offered you different ways to approach interactions. All of the characters in-game, both playable and NPC, were unique and fully fleshed out. If I do another run of the game, I’d be keen to try out different archetypes and explore different interactions, just to see how the story changes.
Sovereign Syndicate benefited from very strong world-building and narrative writing. Although the game design could have been improved to make the game easier to understand, this is a strong debut game from Crimson Herring. I’d love to try out new games by the studio, or even a DLC for Sovereign Syndicate.
