Sovereign Syndicate review

While playing as Atticus Daley, an alcoholic illusionist, I went through an opium dream to explore memories of the orphanage where I grew up. As Clara Reed, a courtesan sleuth, I found a famous doctor blindfolded in a bordello and impersonated his "nurse" to learn about his research. Sovereign Syndicate may be a steampunk CRPG, but it's not ballrooms-and-zeppelins steampunk. It's grubby gutter-fantasy, where you're more likely to meet a rat catcher or streetwalker than the Queen of England.

Sovereign Syndicate borrows heavily from Disco Elysium, both in terms of presentation—the scrolling text interrupted by internal voices—and play. Combat's de-emphasized to the point of barely existing, and uses the same rules as any other test of your abilities. It's not exactly the same game, using tarot cards instead of dice and with a setting that's closer to Arcanum or Shadowrun in a top hat, but it's one of the first RPGs to really build on Disco Elysium. Considering how excellent Disco was, inviting that comparison is as bold as combining a frock coat with fingerless gloves.

A Tale of One City

While the version of Victorian London in Sovereign Syndicate is gritty, it's not reality. Atticus is a minotaur, one section of the East End is a werewolf containment zone, and half the police force seem to be centaurs. The third playable character, Teddy Redgrave, is a dwarf engineer who moonlights as a monster hunter with a steam-powered automaton called Otto as his sidekick.

Having three player-characters lets you see this strange London from different perspectives—even if all of them are on the lower end of the social spectrum. Clara's trying to get together enough money to leave the city, but gets roped into investigating a murderer the papers have dubbed "the Courtesan Killer", while Teddy chases a less-circumspect killer through the sewers, and Atticus tries to hold off the gin bottle so he can find some missing orphans and his long-lost mother.

You play these characters in alternating chapters, and while their orbits overlap, they do their own thing most of the time. There's no character creation, but you do get to personalize this trio of PCs by choosing from four versions of each, with different starting stats and a trait that unlocks different dialogue options. My Atticus may be defined by his wit while yours is dominated by animal instinct, and there's potential replayability in going back with another one.

You personalize them further through play, with choices that embody one of the stats bumping up the relevant bodily humor and eventually boosting its score. Though I chose to give Clara a high starting grace, which represents both physical and social agility, I picked a lot of cleverclogs dialogue that increased her "black bile" bodily humor, slowly making her intellect score go up as I played more like a detective. (Smoking cigarettes had the same result, though at the cost of hope points. More about that later.)

As someone who has never finished a Dragon Age without restarting because I don't like my first character and would actually rather be a mage and have a nicer face, I appreciate having character creation taken out of my hands like this. It sucks to get halfway through a huge RPG and regret a choice you made hours ago when you didn't know the Trickster archetype wouldn't be a fun way to play Wrath of the Righteous and you should probably have angled for the boring old Angel from the start. I know there are people on the internet who think if you don't get to roll up a bespoke PC it's not a real RPG, but if your definition of RPG doesn't include The Witcher 3, Disco Elysium, or Planescape: Torment your definition sucks.

And having three protagonists lets you play a little loose with them, making risky decisions or experimenting with immorality, safe in the knowledge the other two will probably turn out fine. This must be how parents of large families feel.

Parlour Music Elysium

To make the PCs unique they have different names for their stats, and each of those stats has its own voice. In a direct lift from Disco Elysium, the text scrolling down the right side of the screen is frequently interrupted by the voices of these attributes. When Clara steals a bag of cash her intuition suggests an escape route while her intellect counts the money. When Atticus finds an iron maiden his spryness complains that seeing this enclosed device gives it chills, while his animal instinct roars that the bloody thing's a hoax and was never a real tool of torture. Though the voices aren't quite as distinct as Electrochemistry or Shivers, the technique remains effective.

Another way Sovereign Syndicate resembles Disco Elysium is the absence of a combat system. When any action sequence begins, perhaps a chase or a brawl, it plays out in comic-style art with the consequences of your choices—whether you draw your derringer or try to run away, for example—illustrated by subsequent panels. Confrontations still feel noteworthy, but the absence of full-blown combat mechanics means they don't detract from the flow.

What Sovereign Syndicate doesn't take from Disco Elysium is the regular need to reload when you goof and end up dead in a dumpster. It's much more forgiving. Instead of hit points you have hope points, which I found easy to keep high once I dragged myself out of the early-game gutter. The climax suffered a little thanks to this lack of risk, and thinking positive thoughts whenever I saw some leaves on the ground or the coffin-shaped boxes homeless people sleep in kept my hope buoyed whenever my hope briefly fell. Interestingly, your temperament sometimes determines which options are available, and a no-hope run where I could make more vicious or cynical decisions would be an interesting second playthrough.

Sovereign Syndicate also replaces dice with tarot cards. The Major Arcana represents unlockable character traits, the Devil giving you the brutal trait while the Sun makes you confident, and you draw a numbered card from the Minor Arcana for skill checks. You're still generating a random number but in a way that accentuates the era, when occultism was a semi-respectable drawing-room fad while dice games were considered uncouth.

Though Sovereign Syndicate starts strong, the final chapters don't wrap up as neatly as I'd like. Some NPCs and storylines are written out abruptly, and Teddy ends up feeling like a guy who just happened to be there rather than an equal protagonist. The other two-thirds hit the mark, though. Even as someone with no affection for steampunk as a genre, I got caught up in this particular blend of Victorian London and mythology thanks to how well Sovereign Syndicate evokes a time and place. Hell, I even read the highlighted glossary words to understand all the references to historical characters and Cockney slang.