Kingdom

Lore & Background

Kingdom was developed by the two-man team of Amsterdam-based Thomas van den Berg and Iceland-based Marco Bancale, who go by the aliases noio and Licorice, respectively. The game is an expanded, standalone version of a Flash game by noio. The development of the game was supported by Raw Fury, a Sweden-based publisher launched by former members of Paradox Interactive and EA DICE. In May 2019, Raw Fury acquired the rights to the series from van de Berg, allowing the publisher to continue development.

The player starts the game with a randomly generated king or queen on horseback. The player can move the character on horse to the left or right, including at a gallop, but has no other direct action. As the character passes landmarks, these will produce a few coins, from which the player can pick up by riding over them, and spend on various resources, which will be marked with open coin slots when the character passes near them. Initially, such resources will include hiring wandering travelers (vagrants) to become part of the kingdom and creating smiths to craft weapons and tools. As the player gathers more resources, new options to spend coins will open up.

While exploration of the kingdom can lead to finding more coins and potential resources, the areas away from the main kingdom center can become more dangerous for both the player-character and any followers; further, the game has a day-and-night cycle in which more harmful creatures can roam the kingdom at night, with subsequent nights becoming more and more dangerous. Other nights may have blood moons, which will cause much larger hordes of creatures to appear. These creatures will work to destroy existing resources that the player has created, steal gold from the player-character, and if the player-character has no gold, steal their crown, which represents failure in the game from which the player will need to restart the game.

Reader's Guide

Kingdom received generally positive reviews appreciating the game's art and music, and its approach that required the players to figure out what to do based on these elements, but felt that the tedious nature of some tasks in the game affected its end-game and replayability. Dan Stapleton of IGN gave the title a 7.7 out of 10, and felt the lack of instruction combined with the tension of the various random attacks created a great experience for the game. Robert Purchase of Eurogamer gave the game a 'Recommended' rating, believing the game achieved the right balance between being fair to the player while the player learns the mechanics of the game. James Davenport of PC Gamer, giving the game a 70 out of 100, was more critical of the lack of instruction, noting that a half-hour's worth of gameplay investment could be wiped away due to the player not being aware of how certain mechanics work, and that the game would be one to test a player's patience. Reviewers praised the game's retro pixel art look and its chiptune soundtrack, which created the appropriate atmosphere for the title and provided appropriate visual and audible clues as events in the game for the player to pick up on. Reviewers commented that once the player understood the mechanics, the end-game and subsequent replays could become tedious. Stapleton found that the lack of information or means to manage the kingdom at the end-game made the end game more frustrating than difficult, and that once he had found a strategy to deal with the attacks, the game became too easy to play. Davenport commented that while the late game can be exciting on subsequent playthroughs, the early game of setting up the initial kingdom can become monotonous. Kingdom was nominated for the Excellence in Design award for the 2016 Independent Games Festival.

Did You Know?

• Kingdom was originally released as a Flash game in 2013.
• The game was developed by a two-man team: Thomas van den Berg (noio) and Marco Bancale (Licorice).
• Within one day of its release, Raw Fury announced it had sold enough copies to pay for the game's development.
• A reworked version titled Kingdom: New Lands was released in August 2016.