Sovereign Tower's Weird Knights Are the Draw, Not Its Time Travel

There's a moment in Sovereign Tower's early hours where Ursula — one of your recruitable knights — grinds up stray orb-weavers to brew a drink she apparently considers a delicacy. She refuses diplomacy. She refuses eldritch relics. She refuses answering questions. She's a housecat with a sword, and I adore her. That is exactly the energy I want in a Round Table management RPG: knights as chaotic individuals, not stats with helmets.

So it's with genuine disappointment that I have to flag the one element that's leaving me cold: the time travel. The premise of Wild Wits Games' turn-based "Round Table management RPG" is that you're the monarch of a downfallen kingdom, sending eccentric knights out to fix problems. Ursula is one of those knights. There are dragons, there are farcical aquatic ceremonies, there's a whole King Arthur vibe going on. And then there's a time travel mechanic that, in previews at least, hasn't shown me what it's actually for.

Let me be clear: I don't hate time travel as a narrative device. Radiant Historia built a whole game around branching timelines and it's a masterpiece. But there's a specific kind of kingdom management game where time travel undermines what makes ruling fun. Ruling is about consequences. You send a bad knight on a mission, you deal with the fallout. You trust the wrong advisor, you live with the betrayal. Time travel says: don't worry, you can just not do that. That's not rule; that's savescumming with a lore skin.

I keep thinking about The Banner Saga. No time travel there. Just a caravan of survivors walking into an apocalypse, with choices that closed doors permanently. I still remember losing a character because I chose the wrong camp placement. It hurt. It was supposed to hurt. That's the point. The Banner Saga understood that consequence is what gives fantasy weight. Every death in that game stuck, and stuck hard. You carried your losses to the end, and they changed how the final screens read. Sovereign Tower's knights feel like they're built to create that kind of messy attachment — so why hand me a rewind button?

Maybe the time travel isn't a rewind. Maybe it's something more clever, like revealing alternate versions of quests or showing how the kingdom's past infected the present. I haven't seen enough to know. What I've seen is Ursula grinding spiders and complaining about fete attendance, and that's a much stronger pitch than "you can undo your mistakes." A king's job isn't to undo choices — it's to live with them.

There's also a practical side. Time travel mechanics in management games tend to demand bookkeeping. You start tracking which timeline you're in, which version of your knights you've recruited, which decisions you've "locked in." That's homework. I don't want homework. I want to send a creepy little git on a quest and read what weird thing she does when she gets there.

To be fair, King Arthur himself had a pretty rough timeline. The once and future king, pulled out of time, wife issues, a round table that was way more drama than it was worth. Maybe time travel is thematically appropriate for a legend that's literally about a king who returns. But Arthur didn't get to redo Camlann. He went down in the battle, knowing it was coming, and that's why the myth has teeth.

I'm not going to write off Sovereign Tower. The knights are written with a specificity that makes me want to know them all. The kingdom has the kind of grubby, fairy-tale texture that I can sink hours into. But right now, the time travel element feels like a polite party guest standing in the corner of a room full of absolute weirdos. I'd rather spend my evening with the weirdos.

And if Ursula offers me a glass of her orb-weaver special, I'll at least pretend to sip it.