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

Set in a alternate reality London where Centaurs, Minotaurs, Dwarves and other fantastical creatures mingle with Humanity. Incorporating steampunk styles of design and technology this is 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 in place.

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

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

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

Because this is an adventure game there is a LOT of reading in Sovereign Syndicate between story beats, conversations, internal monologues and lore. The writing ranges from outstanding to muddled so it does ebb and flow but 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). With them introduced the game splinters as three separate yet weavingly parallel stories start to unfold.

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, 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 of Sovereign Syndicate 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 in the game (which makes sense due to 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 on January 15th for PC via Steam.