Kingsway

Or: One Trick Pony

I do not need or want every game to be some massive epic that takes dozens and dozens of hours to finish. I also think that trying to equate the quality or rating of a game with how long it is is just a downward spiral of a conversation.

I like little digital novelties. I really like experimental games. Its why I absolutely need to own a VR headset, it is why I bought a Panic Playdate, and its why I am generally willing to give anything a look once, as evidenced by this project, eventually. I really love to be shown something I haven’t seen before or to see some novel twist on an existing idea. These games might not ever be in some “Top 10” of the year or other list, but they are frequent things that I bring up in conversations. One of my go to examples its the active time battle chess game that is part of Glittermitten Grove - which is to say a chess game where every piece has its own cooldown and there are no turns. Thats a cool little thing.

Kingsway is a 2017 release developed by Andrew Morrish and published by the now defunct Adult Swim Games. The pitch for it is fairly straightforward, it is a run based fantasy RPG. You will travel across an overworld, you will find dungeons, towns, and shops. You engage in active time battles with monsters and get randomized loot and equipment. To win a run, you need to travel to three beacons in the overworld, light them, proceed to the King’s castle, then defeat the final boss. Very standard video game stuff. As far as all of these mechanics go it is pretty bog standard and not particularly interesting - like playing chess. But I would not be writing anything up if that was all there was here. Kingway’s gimmick is in the presentation. Instead of your typical slate of text based actions and shifting in and out of battles and the overworld, Kingsway will instead have you navigating a virtual desktop.

Quests are sent to you as emails. Folders are how you upgrade and organize your inventory. Enemies can attack with popups that must be dealt with to avoid taking damage. Background music is controlled with a little fake media player. Because combat takes place in real time with loading bars for both your attacks and enemy attacks, being able to quickly maneuver around these windows to find items you need is essential. Some of the enemies I encountered also were capable of closing my windows as part of their attacks, so I needed to scramble to get them open again. You can also sometimes fight multiple enemies at once who will exist each in their own window and the same goes for any minions you summon to assist in combat. Its all a little hectic but far from too much to manage.

It being a run based game I must say let me down a little bit. It was 2017 and that was super hot at the time and this is also developed by a single individual so I can understand the ways that can be used to get a lot more out of it for more people. However I won at my very first run of the game. Mind you this is not having a great understanding of what I needed to be doing or the overall metagame. I talked about this previously about how a run based game that you just win every time is kinda deflating and I do sorta stand by that with this one. There are permanent upgrades that can be purchased, probably several classes to unlock, and most importantly you can make your in game cursor look like a sword or a gauntlet or other such things. Itch.io is a great haven for finding little things in this vein but I definitely prefer when there is as much polish put into the presentation as something like Kingsway. Also the music is insanely good and is probably the strongest single component of the entire experience.

It might be in part because I don’t actually find the minute to minute of a game like this to be particularly fun. Someone who played a lot more Ultima would maybe get more out of it but it really doesn’t seem to have much depth from what I played. Full price for it is $10 and I have seen it for significantly cheaper than that. Even though I only got a couple hours out of it I am left overall very satisfied simply because I think the one gimmick is so novel. Give me $10 games all day long that are just weird little ideas that are just enough of a full experience to see that idea through and push it as far as you can. It left me wanting a more complicated version of the game. Games that mess with your computer and your files and require actions to be taken outside of the game are one thing, but I don’t want this to be doing that. I am talking purely about having to deal with more things affecting my fake virtual computer. Let enemies disable the computer’s fans, or have more enemies make the entire thing run slower, I think there’s a ton more that can be done with the core concept.

This isn’t meant to come off as too negative on the game. With the low level of difficulty and a full run only taking about an hour I would actually feel super comfortable recommending this particular experience to someone. But I hate to present it like a “novelty” or a “joke” because I think so many games in this vein are often comedy games. Its just a cool idea. A singular and focused cool idea that was put out into the world and I am better for having experienced it. I am just probably not going to come back to it myself. There are significantly worse ways to spend and afternoon.