The King is Watching review

The King is Watching deftly merges real-time strategy, tower defense, and roguelike elements to deliver a distinctive experience. As with many titles, you’re tasked with overseeing a kingdom. But your power is conspicuously constricted by the limits of the monarch’s gaze. For developer Hypnohead, productivity only occurs when workers are being monitored.

Symbolically, this is represented by an area-of-effect grid that can be rotated and moved. Only buildings and resources within the King’s field of view are operational. So, starting off, you’ll be shuffling a three-square tetromino to build housing, basic supplies, as well as to craft some crude defenses. The last element is especially important, as bands of enemies will approach and attack your front gates. Once they breach the fortified entryway, the game ends.

Thou Eyes Mustn’t Rest, My Liege

Expectedly, the game demands that you juggle which structures get priority at every moment. This evolving system supplies The King is Watching with a healthy amount of strategic challenge as you ensure you have enough resources for an upcoming need. Each new grid has a build cost and memorizing those figures can streamline the game’s onboarding process.

That said, King’s learning curve isn’t as steep as you might initially suspect. The tutorial definitely does a serviceable job of teaching the basics while mastery stems from experimenting with gaze administration and shrewd timing. Early on, resource scarcity hits the kingdom hard, making decisions about which buildings to construct feel decisive. What the lessons don’t communicate is the importance of pausing the game and planning your next step. This becomes imperative as enemy assault increase in frequency and proficiency.

The Realm Resists Stagnancy

Gratifyingly, The King in Watching escalates difficulty in satisfying increments. Not only will you face new bosses and win conditions, but each biome has its own form of progression. As such, you’ll undoubtedly need to adjust your strategies for the game’s different locales. Following each run, you’ll be rewarded with in-game currency to spend on upgrades. Meanwhile, challenge achievements provide crystals that can be used for more potent unlocks. Best of all, each venue reveals previously unseen synergies between spells, buildings, and combat units.

Unsurprisingly, King’s metagame progression becomes one of the main motivators to keep the defending interesting. After each run, you’ll be able to invest dividends into a robust meta-upgrade tree that lets you boost morale, unlock new buildings and spells, or even change which kings and advisors you have in your next attempt. With their own unique perks, the allure of a new upgrade or a different advisor tempts you to revisit King, even though a disheartening loss is almost inevitable.

A Slightly Sisyphean Rule

However, some may find the game’s reliance on meta-progression a double-edged sword. While it drip-feeds new variables and increasingly complex synergy options, victory almost always demands substantial upgrade investments. Rarely can raw ingenuity prevail with prior unlocks. So, King is Watching can feel like a grind if you’re expected advancement without a ton of replay.

With its clever and engaging management system where the monarch’s point-of-view is your main tool, The King in Watching is a distinctive real-time strategy title. Unquestionably, the game rewards those willing to learn its nuances and rhythms, especially with rich metagame rewards. While this design decision might deter players seeking quick domination, strategists should appreciate King’s crafty concept.

The King is Watching was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.