While I’m normally a fan of demos, and especially well done demos, it almost feels like this one backfired. There’s not quite enough story to either satisfy as a brief experience or properly tease the full release. You’ll pick up items, some of which are useful, others seemingly useless, all of which have no good explanation about their utility or contextual hints about how they might be used. The actual structure and layout of the suit decks isn’t explained particularly well. Worse, there are situations where you’re already talented enough without drawing a card to pass the check, but you’re still forced to do so for some obscure reason. The constraints you run headfirst into are obvious and frustrating, which isn’t a good thing for a demo because you’ll have long since stopped being interested about overcoming them. One hopes that Sovereign Syndicate will be more enjoyable once the full game is released, but the demo does not exactly inspire confidence.