The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break

Some games look really great in screenshots. Sovereign Syndicate isn't really one of them, which is a shame because it looks very good indeed while you're playing it. It uses a kind of angled, overhead perspective and has a fixed camera with no zoom function and also displays a huge dialog box all down the right side of the screen, all of which means it's next to impossible to get a shot that doesn't look... well, like a video game.

Sovereign Syndicate - SS for short - shares a good deal of its gaming DNA with its most obvious influence, Disco Elysium. I had exactly the same issue getting good shots to illustrate posts when I was playing that one, too. 

Not that that should put anyone off; it's purely a reviewer's problem. From the player's point of view, the whole thing looks stylish and feels very comfortable. I just mention it because I have a particular aversion to showing the UI in any game unless the UI is what's under discussion. But that's just me. For the purposes of a review, it's probably better to show the whole screen as it would appear if you were playing. Truth in advertising and all that.

On with the review, then. Of the demo, that is, although since a demo is supposed to be a shop window for the full game, I suppose it's fair to collate the two. 

Sometimes I feel I'm reviewing the demos as standalone mini-games rather than extended trailers for the finished product, which is hardly suprising given that's pretty much how I think of them. In this case, very unusually, I've played the demo twice, all the way through. I almost never do that. Why would I? More cogently, why did I?

In this instance it was because my first run-through made me realize I might have missed large sections of the demo even though it told me I'd completed the whole thing. That's always a possibility with games of this kind - visual novels, adventure games, mysteries, choices matter, whatever you want to call them - but not usually in the demo.

On my first playthrough, I got to the Game Over screen without having gone through a door I opened right at the beginning. Almost the first thing I did, after my character awoke from a drugged and drunken stupor, was open a padlock on a door next to him, where he was lying in a heap in the street. (Sets the tone, doesn't it?)

For various perfectly sound reasons I ended up not going through that door. I left it for later as I explored the area outside and somehow managed to play for three-quarters of an hour, a decent length for a demo, only to arrive at the ending without ever going back to the start

Tonight, after I came home from work and finished my tea, I sat down to write this quick review of the demo, which was when I realised I wasn't ready to do it until I'd seen what was on the other side of that door. I started over and once more rolled the dice to finesse the lock.

More accurately, I flipped a Tarot card. That's the conceit the game uses to represent RNG skill checks. It makes for an attractive visual trope and it's aesthetically in keeping with the milieu. How it's in any material way different from just rolling a dice I couldn't say but it makes a change.

I made the roll (See? It's still always going to be a "roll" even if it's a card.) and this time I made sure to go through the door right away. As it turned out, there was about as much to see and do on the far side as there was in the area I'd explored the night before. More, probably. 

There's a third potential route out of the opening location as well, meaning the demo could be even bigger, but although the game suggests it's possible, I haven't been able to find the means to pass the electrified fence that seperates the starting location from werewolf territory, which may be just as well.

This, of course, is a fundemental problem with both "choices matter" games and with those that use some form of skill check to determine if and when content becomes available. Sovereign Syndicate, which employs both branching dialog trees and skill rolls, also uses stat thresholds to block or enable certain options, meaning what you get to see and do depends a great deal on both chance and choice. 

It's an approach I welcome in theory if not always so much in practice. In most games that allow it, my clear preference is for a single playthrough, during which I hold my character to an imagined set of values and try to make all choices accordingly, whether or not they're in my best interest as a player. I like to think of the game as a window into a world where these things happen, not a workshopped rehearsal, where the actors go over and over the same lines until they find the ideal reading.

That does tend to collapse all the options although not generally as conclusively as happened during my first playthrough, where I made a choice that had me killed outright. To be fair, I did opt to "take the death dose" so I can't say I wasn't warned.

Curiously, in my second playthrough that option was greyed out. I hadn't passed some threshold that would allow my character even to consider such a course of action. I think I wasn't "world-weary" enough. Had I not played again, I wouldn't have known about that mechanic because in my first run-through, nothing was forbidden. In my second, several things were. 

I'm sure the game explained it at some point. The demo seems to be the opening of the game, which also acts as its own tutorial. There's always a lot to take in with games of this kind and it takes me much longer than a couple of hours to get to grips with the complex mechanics, which is, of course, a big part of the appeal.

All of this will be quite familiar to anyone who played Disco Elysium, as would the grimy, decaying urban setting, the heavy reliance on drugs and alcohol, the whispering voice in the back of your character's mind and the general sense of bitter disappointment and degradation. Even the color palette and font choices are reminiscent.

To that list you can also add an ominous and portentous running commentary and a writing team who know a lot of unfamiliar words and want to be sure you know about it. In the case of Sovereign Syndicate they're so keen for you to notice their impressive vocabulary, they highlight every word or phrase they suspect you might not know in yellow so you can mouse over it for a gloss.

I found that very irritating after a while, particularly since some of the words and phrases were quite ordinary or used inaccurately or mis-explained. The action takes place in a version of Victorian London but unlike another of Crimson Herring's obvious influences, Failbetter Games, the faux-Dickensian language isn't always employed either precisely or appropriately. I put this down to the designers not working in their first language until I looked them up and found they were Canadian.

Of course, SS takes place not in our Victorian London but in an alternate reality. In that context, as that eminent Victorian, Lewis Carroll might have put it, their words mean exactly what they say they do, so there's really no point my taking issue with their usages or definitions. 

Even so, if I had give Crimson Herring a single note as a result of playing the demo it would be that there should be an option in the finished game to turn that bloody highlighting off. I found it both distracting and annoying. Yes, of course you can just not hover your mouse over it but that would requires a real-life Self Discipline check I'd frequently fail.

Speaking of Self Discipline, it is indeed one of the four "Humours" that act as your basic stats, the others being Animal Instinct, Wit and Spryness. On my first playthrough Self Discipline was the one I emphasized, which makes me tediously predictable. I played Disco Elysium in exactly the same, strait-laced, humorless fashion. I'm not sure why I feel compelled to role-play the po-faced killjoy in every game that allows it and I probably don't want to find out.

In the second round, instead of primly refusing all temptation, I stole, drank and took all the drugs I was offered, which is probably why I was unable to "Take the death dose". The game clearly thought I was enjoying myself far too much to want to end it all. In my defence, the first time around I wasn't really filled with terminal ennui. I just didn't believe drinking the stuff would actually kill me!

I do like a game that lets you end yourself rather than do something you don't want to do, just because a mysterious stranger tries to bully you into doing it, but it does rather put a crimp in proceedings if there's also no Save function. There isn't any in the demo, at least as far as I could tell. There's an autosave but that's it.

Naturally, I would have saved before drinking the fatal draft if I could because I'm not a complete zealot. Since the option wasn't there, it was fortunate that I only had to replay the last conversation to get back to the fatal choice: to dream or not to dream. Come to think of it, I guess that was the autosave...

As I discovered on my second playthrough, the game isn't going to allow you to skip the dream sequence. It's the pay-off. I thought there might be some way around it but if there was I didn't find it. Even though my relentless robbing and thieving left me with far more money than I'd been able to acquire by being morally correct, I didn't get any chance to spend it. Behaving like an amoral thug, willing to fight anyone over anything, didn't get me anywhere either. 

It did allow me to see a couple of mechanics I hadn't experienced in the first run-through, though. Fight sequences are determined by the draw of a Tarot card with the result being represented by a series of striking black and white illustrations. It's an elegant and appealing solution to the problem of representing physical confrontation in a mostly conversational game.

There's a more detailed description of the full game to be found at Crimson Herring's website than you can see on the Steam page but both of them mention the "open world" aspect of the game. Some of that openness is evident in the demo but the overall experience is more guided than it first appears.

If a game is going to offer a number of parallel paths all leading to the same end, it needs to be exceptionally well-constructed. On the evidence of the demo I suspect SS might need a little tightening here and there. 

There was one odd encounter with a watchman that didn't seem to make sense, as he told me I couldn't go any further but then ignored me completely when I did. I thought it was going to be a stealth encounter, where I'd have to time my movements so he didn't see me but we ended up jostling past each other on the stairs and he made no move to stop me or even to acknowledge my existence.

Perhaps more concerningly, on my first playthrough I came across a notice asking for information about two missing orphans, a brother and sister. I accepted a mission to find them, but the demo ended before I had a chance to do anything about it. On my second playthrough, I ran across the said sister, being menaced in a sewer. I frightened off her assailant and agreed to help her find her brother,adding a mission to that effect to my journal. When I emerged from the sewer a little later, I found the same notice about the missing orphans and it also added a mission to my to-do list, even though I'd just been speaking to one of the orphans in question. 

That wouldn't need to be a paradox if the game acknowledged the synchronicity but as far as I could tell it didn't. The again, I don't want to sound too critical because I can't be absolutely sure exactly what information was added to the Journal. I didn't check at the time and I can't go back and do it now because of the lack of a save function. I'd have to play through the whole thing a third time and I'm not doing that just for science.

Whether or not the writers have covered the conflicting quest issue or not, the fact that it felt jarring when it happened is an indicator that, while Sovereign Syndicate may remind me strongly of Disco Elysium it isn't really quite up there with its role-model, at least not yet. 

It's unfair to compare a completed game with a demo for a work in progress. It may well be that any anomalies of this sort will all have been ironed out by the time the game launches, which according the Steam Store is due to happen next January. What won't have changed by then is the quality of the writing which, while very good, isn't quite of a standard with Za/Um's exceptional work. 

From what I saw in the demo, Sovereign Syndicate is a well-written, well-constructed but moderately traditional adventure game, set in a striking but fundementally familiar setting. The Victorian steampunk milieu is lovingly realised and delightfully drawn but it's about as mainstream these days as high fantasy was fifteen or twenty years ago. Disco Elysium, on the other hand, is like nothing I've played before or since.

That's not a complaint, just an observation. I'd like to see someone make another Disco Elysium, sure, but until someone does, I'll happily take this instead. I like Victorian steampunk well enough and while it's done often it's not often done as well as this. I liked all the clunky, idiosyncratic automata with vapor hissing from their joints, the subterranean opium dens furnished in faded red velvet, the dark alleys poorly lit by gaslight and the grimy squares paved with flagstones...

There are strange cults and low-key magic and sparking electric fences built to keep the werewolves out... or is that in? The protagonist is a minotaur, the opium den is run by centaurs... there's plenty to keep even a jaded steampunk veteran guessing, although I suspect steampunk purists might bristle a little at the inclusion of quite so many mythical and fantastic beasts.

According to the website, the full game will offer a choice of three playable characters. The demo only offers one, the minotaur, who goes by the somewhat unfortunate name of Atticus Daley. I couldn't stop myself from thinking of him as Arthur Daley, the character so memorably played for many years by George Cole in the eighties' TV show Minder. I guess that's only going to be a problem for British players of a certain age.

For that reason alone, when the finished game arrives I'll probably play either Clara Reed - "a corsair with a checkered past" or Otto, an automaton. I imagine to get the full experience you'll need to play the whole thing at least three times, once as each of them.

On the evidence of the demo, that's something I might even do. I've wishlisted Sovereign Syndicate and there's a better than average chance I'll follow through and buy it. It may not be the new Disco Elysium but it's shaping up to be a pretty good game in its own right.