Playing Atticus Daley, an alcoholic illusionist, I dreamed of opium and explored memories of the orphanage where I grew up. As Clara Reed, a court detective, I found a famous doctor blindfolded in a brothel, impersonating his "nurse" and investigating his research. The Sovereign Syndicate may be a steampunk CRPG, but it is not the steampunk of balls and zeppelins. It is a bawdy gutter fantasy where you are more likely to encounter rat catchers and streetwalkers than the Queen of England.

Sovereign Syndicate borrows a lot from Disco Elysium, both in terms of direction - scrolling text interrupted by an inner voice - and play. Combat is de-emphasized to the point of almost non-existence and uses the same rules as other ability tests. It uses tarot cards instead of dice, the setting is close to Arcanum and Shadowrun, and while it is not exactly the same game as Disco Elysium, it is one of the first RPGs based on Disco Elysium. Given how good Disco was, this comparison is as bold as combining a frock coat with fingerless gloves.

The Sovereign Syndicate's version of Victorian London is harsh, but not unreal. Atticus is a minotaur, a corner of the East End is a werewolf containment area, and half the police force seems to be centaurs; the third playable character, Teddy Redgrave, is a dwarf engineer, moonlighting as a monster hunter with a steam engine named Otto as his sidekick. He is bathed in the moonlight.

The three player characters allow the player to see this strange London from different perspectives. Clara is trying to raise money to leave the city, but gets caught up in the investigation of a murderer the newspaper has dubbed the "Courtesan Killer," Teddy chases a less suspicious killer in the sewers, and Atticus tries to resist a bottle of gin to find a missing orphan and his long-lost mother.

These characters are played alternately in chapters, with overlapping trajectories, but most of the time they do their own thing. You cannot create a character, but you can personalize these three PCs by choosing from four different versions. My Atticus is witty and your Atticus is ruled by animal instincts.

You can personalize them further through play, choosing an option that embodies one of their statuses will up their associated physical humor and ultimately their score. I chose to give Clara "grace," which represents physical and social agility, but chose a lot of clever dialogue that increased her "black bile" body humor and gradually increased her intelligence score as she played more like a detective. (Smoking cigarettes produced the same results, but at the expense of hope scores. More on that later.)

As someone who never finished Dragon Age without restarting because I didn't like my first character and really wanted to look better as a mage, I appreciate this way of taking the character creation out of my hands. It sucks to be in the middle of a huge RPG and regret your choice a few hours ago, not knowing that the Trickster archetype is not a fun way to play Wrath of the Righteous. I know some people on the internet think that if you don't roll up a custom-made PC it's not a real RPG, but if your definition of RPG doesn't include The Witcher 3, Disco Elysium, or Planescape, then your definition sucks: If it doesn't include Torment, then your definition sucks.

Also, having three protagonists allows you to play a little loose, making risky decisions and conducting immoral experiments in the confidence that the other two will probably work out. This must be how parents of large families feel.

To make PCs unique, they have different names for their statuses, and each of these statuses has its own voice. Taken 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 simultaneously counts the money. When Atticus finds the iron maiden, his health complains that the sight of this hermetically sealed device gives him chills, while his animal instincts snarl that the bloody thing was a hoax and not a real torture device. The voices are not as distinct as in "Electrochemistry" or "Shiver," but the technique remains effective.

Another way in which "The Sovereign Syndicate" resembles "Disco Elysium" is the lack of a combat system. When the action, such as chases and brawls, begin, they unfold in comic-style art, and the results of choices, such as whether to pull a Dillinger or run away, for example, are depicted in the panels that follow. The confrontations are still noteworthy, but the lack of full-blown combat mechanics does not detract from the flow. [What "Sovereign Syndicate" doesn't carry over from "Disco Elysium" is the need to reload when you die in the trash because you were fooling around. More forgiving. Instead of hit points, there are Hope Points, which I found easy to keep high once I got out of the doldrums early on. The climax was a bit painful thanks to this lack of risk, but by thinking positive every time I saw a leaf on the ground or a coffin-shaped box with a homeless man sleeping in it, I was able to hold on to hope even when hope temporarily dipped. Interestingly, one's temperament can determine which options are available, and the no-hope run, with its more vicious and cynical decisions, can be an interesting second play-through.

Sovereign Syndicate also replaces dice with tarot cards. The Major Arcana represent unlockable character traits, with the Devil giving the brutal trait and the Sun making the character confident. You are still generating random numbers in a way that emphasizes a time when dice games were considered wild, while occultism was a semi-respectable sit-down game fad.

While The Sovereign Syndicate begins strongly, the final chapter is not as neatly organized as I would have liked. Several NPCs and storylines are written out abruptly, and Teddy feels more like a guy who just happened to be there than an equal protagonist. The other two-thirds, however, hit the mark. Even I, who have no interest in the steampunk genre, was enthralled by this fusion of Victorian London and mythology, thanks to the Sovereign Syndicate's successful evocation of time and place. I even read the highlighted glossary to understand the references to historical figures and Cockney slang.