I don’t think Kingsgrave quite knows what a king actually does. It seems to think that a king is one part soldier, to one part mage, to one part village handyman. The kind of royal that will destroy an invading army with one hand, while erecting a logging mill with the other. Bit of a far cry from the kings that I know. These days, it’s mainly doing little understated waves to cameras. Even back in the day, it seemed they spent most of the time beheading their wives.
There’s little of that in Kingsgrave. Instead, what we’ve got is an odd little concotion of different gameplay mechanics. At its base, it’s a Zelda-eqsue game, with a dusting of metroidvania. You stroll around the landscape, looking for the one that little area that you can break into it, so you can hunt around for the item that’ll unlock the next area. Kingsgrave layers a variety of bits on top of that, the most peculiar being a crafting system. It took me a while to decide if I liked it. The answer is ‘yes’, but imagine it said in a hesitant, hand-waving way.
Long Lived The King
Let’s set the scene before we delve into the strangeness. Kingsgrave opens with our titular king lounging around on his throne, overseeing his domain. It would be almost peaceful, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s literally a crumbling skeleton. Fortunately, a spirit soon appears that shocks him back to life and tells him to get off his royal behind and begin combing through the rubble of his kingdom for survivors. It’s a quest that’s going to involve a lot of bopping slimes with your scepter.
The destroyed kingdom is rather an important note, as it turns out, as a lot of your skills are gained from reconstructing the relevant buildings. So if you want a new spear, say, you need to rebuild the special spear smithy. To do that, you need to collect the wood and other materials to build it and a villager to run it. Quite the far cry from grabbing it out of a moldy chest in some forgotten dungeon. I think I like this aspect of Kingsgrave, but it’s slightly hard to say. It seems to add and yet subtract from the overall metroidvania formula.
It adds because it prevents the standard linear flow that tends to plague the genre. Rather than just moving from one mechanic to the next, you need to poke around to continue finding materials. Stumbling on a cache of scrap metal can unlock a variety of different things, ensuring the map unfolds in an open-ended way. It’s a bit more freedom than usual – even if it does descend into just buying up materials with monster guts. On the other hand, the overall lack of direction makes it easy to get hopelessly lost. Fighting through a tough battle to be rewarded with three emeralds – which I cannot find any use for yet – is confusing and not a little demoralising.
Royal Rumble
Kingsgrave’s plot doesn’t give much direction to things either. It’s a light presence throughout, giving little prompts other than ‘find survivors’ and ‘collect all of the weapons’. A little bit more of a nudge – or at least giving more villagers a personality beyond a number – might have helped. It also ends extremely abruptly. After beating the final baddie, there are a couple of lines of dialogue before a smash-cut to a single page of text. It’s like if The Lord of the Rings cut at the exact moment the ring melted and covered all the other stuff with a hastily scrawled page sellotaped to the screen.
It’s largely saved by the quite excellent map and some interesting notes in the combat. The main one being that enemies have types. Not in the usual fire, water, grass kind of way, mind. In this case, it’s best described as bony, squishy and woody. Each type has a weapon that’s suited for it: scepter, spear or axe. Ever try and cut down a tree with a spear? It forced me to use all the different weapons, which I feel is good design. I couldn’t pick a style and stick with it. Weapons also play directly into the puzzles, though they’re a bit too easy as a result. Half are just hitting a block with the right weapon to change the block’s symbol. Others fall back on the standard beam of light puzzle.
The combat does have quite a few upgrades to it, though, which can be freely swapped out. I liked that. I could switch from light arrows to fight the shadow creatures, to fire ones for the trees. It does have a bit of clunkiness around it though. Blows don’t have much impact, for one, and the reach of the weapons is awkward to gauge. Kingsgrave‘s difficulty is also a proper bell curve. The axe is awful, for instance, so wooden enemies massively spike the difficulty. You also can’t hurt shadow enemies until you get a certain spell. When you have that spell, though, you’ll shortly find it does insane damage when combined with the bow, meaning even the final boss went down without a fight.
Kingsgrave – Rough But Interesting
I found Kingsgrave easy to pick holes in but honestly I struggled to put it down over the weekend. It’s certainly rough around the edges – I kept triggering the same dialogue sections over and over for instance – but I think the core gameplay loop keeps it afloat. The need to collect and invest resources means poking around in the corners is always rewarded. Whenever I’d find a new mine or trader, I’d immediatly get excited about all the new opportunities that were suddenly available to me. Plus I’m a sucker for some light Bullet Hell mechanics.
At times, it feels like a big chunk of mechanics thrown into a pot, a few of which are unnecessary. It counts your days, for example, respawning enemies and healing you at the cost of one day. The day counter doesn’t seem to do anything, though. I also wish we had a bit more context to things; a bit more flavour to the world. Still, I found Kingsgrave to be quite pleasant, in a way that’s almost reminiscient of old-school flash games. It’s a hodge-podge of ideas, some of which work and some of which don’t. But it kept me entertained on a dull Sunday afternoon, and you can’t say fairer than that.
