Brutal state
Kingdom is easy at first. My job is to assign peasants tasks as
they stave off waves of monsters, and it’s like working on a
slow-moving assembly line. But then the conveyor belt
speeds up and I stop recognising the machinery. Imps attack
in numbers greater than my army of archers can handle, and
phantasms appear and fly over my highest walls to chow on my builders.
It’s a merciless shift from Zen to ten that robs me of my peace of mind.
With every new game of Kingdom,
you spawn as a king or queen atop a
horse and canter along a forested 2D
plane until you stumble upon a few
loose coins. They can be spent on
recruiting new villagers, tools,
building fortifications,
or on mysterious
monoliths hidden in
the forest. The first
required purchase is a
campfire. Throw a coin
into the empty coin
space hovering above it
and you’ve kicked off
your kingdom. You’re
prompted to give some wandering
peasants a coin, then to drop a few
more into bows and hammers. Your
new followers will pick up whatever
tool is nearest to them, provided
they’re not already equipped. And
that’s where Kingdom stops
explaining anything.
Mystery and subtlety are central
to Kingdom. Nothing is overtly
communicated. Close scrutiny of
otherwise simple aspects of the game
(animation, musical cues, lighting) is
vital to achieve the highest build
efficiency. For example, I found that
if I had tools ready for new villagers
back at my hold, when
I recruited them at
their camps deep in the
forest, they would
scurry just a little bit
faster than normal to
join me.
But the motive to
pay attention didn’t
come without failure,
and I failed a lot. Monsters can attack
from any side every night, and if they
decimate your camp of supplies and
coins, they’ll go for your crown next,
which means it’s time to start over. In
my first hour or so, I didn’t mind.
Failure was often the result of
missing an obvious cue, mechanic, or
because I just made a dumb mistake.
But once I got a few hours of
build more efficiently, a single game
could last upwards of 45 minutes.
Lessons start to come in smaller
doses or not at all. There’s too much
important mechanical depth hidden
in Kingdom’s presentation to send the
player back half an hour without
teaching them something. Failing
these long games tested me.
Luckily, the music went a long
way to keeping me sane. A soft
chiptune soundtrack rings in each
morning with pleasant harmonics
and pulls my patience out of the mud
with a gentle tug or two. It serves as a
lovely backdrop to a beautiful,
mysterious world I desperately want
to explore, which is why it’s so
painful to find the game such a grind.
There were thrilling moments where
an army of monsters were throwing
themselves against my last defences
and I barely managed to make it to
morning – it just takes too long
between failures to reach the point
where I find opportunity to grow
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