![]() If your ruler gets caught out in the wilderness at night, with an exhausted horse, you can lose the game almost immediately. Meanwhile, there are demon portals spewing enemies every night, and more and more come each time. If it’s the last tree between your base and recruit camp, chopping it down gets rid of that camp forever. And chopping the tree will change the map permanently as well. There’s no way to erase that mark - your worker will come and try to chop the tree down even if he’s totally exposed to demon attacks. ![]() Going back to chopping that tree down: when you put the gold piece on the tree, it gets an ‘X’ put on it. Here’s a random shrine that costs seven gold to activate - what does it do? There’s mystery and nuance here, and learning Kingdom is a process of trial-and-error. You wander around a map, taking in the atmosphere. But that’s not what it seems like at first. But rabbit gold only lasts so long - eventually it’ll be more efficient to build farms and buy farming equipment for your people, which has much more of an up-front cost.Īlthough, when I talk like this, I make it sound like Kingdom is a cold hard game of numbers, and at its center, it is. When you start a new game, it’s worthwhile to build a bunch of bows for your citizens: during the day, they’ll hunt rabbits, which turns into gold, and at night, they’ll fend off invaders. There are two core choices you’re constantly making in Kingdom : how to spend the money your little citizens collect for you, and when to risk expanding. Every night, little demons come and attack - or big demons during the dangerous “blood moons.” If you don’t have your act together, you can lose the game, or find your budding kingdom crippled economically by the attacks. Drop ten coins on your wooden home castle and watch it turn into a stone one, which allows the recruitment of knights, for price.Īnd yet within that, there’s a decently robust strategy game, something of a cross between a survival strategy game like RimWorld and a tower defense game. Find a camp with indigents, drop a coin on them, and they’ll join your army. See a tree, drop a coin on it, and a builder citizen will walk over and chop it down. The only relevant buttons are moving left and right, galloping, and using coins. You play a ruler on horseback who basically gathers and dispenses coins on a two-dimensional, side-scrolling map. With gorgeous pixel art, pleasantly simple music, and no text or menus to speak of, Kingdom looks and feels like a Limbo -like indie throwback. ![]() But the thing that makes it special is that it’s wrapped in a package that looks like anything but a Civilization or Crusader Kings. Kingdom is the core idea of a strategy game, stripped down to its bare bones.Īll the stuff that “should” be in a game about building up the eponymous kingdom is present: you grow your population, build a more complex economy, forge weapons, and fight off enemies. ![]()
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