Kingdom, from Thomas van den Berg (Noio) and Marco Bancale (Licorice), is an ingenious game of strategy and discovery, which is an uncommon combination. There’s also an element of tower defense and there’s even a touch of horror in there. The interface is elegantly simple and leads to a series of surprisingly complex decisions.
You begin the game as a king without subjects, riding through the wilderness on your horse. Unlike the omniscient bird’s eye view of most strategy games, you are on the ground moving among your subjects. You view the action from a sidescrolling perspective. And what a view it is! The landscape is lush, vibrant, and beautiful. The attention to details like the movement of clouds, reflections on water, and the changing light as day transitions to night, makes the world feel alive. Kingdom boasts some of the most pleasing pixel art I’ve ever seen.
In your kingdom, the coin of the realm is your only resource; it is also a measure of your personal health and your means of interacting with the world. By spending coins in the right places, you can build up a stronghold from nothing, expand it to control more territory, and try to defend it against regular nocturnal assaults.
With coins, you can recruit subjects from peasant camps and then assign them jobs such as farmer, archer, and engineer. As your wealth increases, you can upgrade structures, attain better building materials, and create new job types. Your subjects will carry out their tasks without any guidance from you, which is both a blessing and a curse. You just pay them and they’ll go about their business of hunting, building, or fighting. They may not be the brightest of minions, but they’re diligent workers.
Your efforts must be constantly balanced between producing coins and enhancing your military strength. You’ve chosen quite a place to build your kingdom, being flanked by portals that spew forth greedy monsters at night. They want your coins, and they will pull apart your constructions and your people—and you—to get at them. Eventually, you might become strong enough to take the fight to your aggressors, but you’ve got a long way to go before that.
It’s a good thing that you have a horse (apparently the only one in the land) because you’ll spend a lot of time riding back and forth, surveying you territory and exploring what lies beyond. You need to keep expanding to discover and activate the best upgrades, which you’ll need if you hope to have a chance of taking the offensive. You’re also fighting a war on two fronts, and the monsters will attack whether you’re there to see it or not.
Being on the battlefield to witness your troops being ripped apart into coins makes the stakes feel higher than if you were floating somewhere in the sky. It also puts you at personal risk. It’s a good idea to keep a few coins handy to cast upon the ground and distract any pursuers, in the likely situation that your fighters are decimated.
Every coin you spend is a crucial decision, affecting both your short-term survival rate and your long-term viability as a kingdom. As in life, you always want to spend more than you have available, which makes for a lot of deliciously excruciating choices. There are moments of triumph, stretches of despair, and many steps forward followed by two steps back. On many occasions, you’ll claim new territory and build up your defenses only to end up having to retreat during the night’s battle. My advice is to avoid spreading yourself too thinly; only expand when you’ve got enough walls and soldiers in place to hold onto what you already have. The crux is figuring out exactly when that balance is struck. It’s easy to be a king, but it’s incredibly hard to rule well.
Kingdom (for Windows, Mac, SteamOS, and Linux) is $9.99 on Steam and several other stores. It’s worth every coin.
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