Royals—a game in which the objective is to remain optimistic and attempt to rule the realm.
Last week, someone in my Facebook group recommended Royals (link to its page on itch.io – Mac and Windows compatible), a game by Asher Vollmer (link to website). Like its subtitle suggests, Royals is a game that places you in the role of a very optimistic peasant. You are given no instruction other than the basic controls (arrow keys, z to accept, x to cancel). The idea for this game in terms of its format is that it is supposed to be like finding a floppy disk with a game on it and discovering that you no longer have the manual. Because I will be talking about the mechanics of the game in a way that would likely spoil the intention of the creator, I highly encourage you to try the game for yourself first (it is free unless you choose to make a donation).
The game starts out by asking what your goal is. This functions as a way to determine the identity of your character. You are presented with three choices: becoming queen/king/royal. I appreciated how the game included a gender neutral option, considering how many games still revolve around a female/male binary when creating a character. Additionally, not much changes between each choice aside from the name and title of the current monarch of the realm. Your avatar does not look different and you are not given different stats based on your choice. Little things like this can do a lot for players who are outside of the gender/sex binary and looking for things that are inclusive of them.
That said, let’s talk about the mechanics of the game itself.
You are given a small, randomly generated map with a variety of small icons representing forests, farms, mountains, and other landmarks that you can interact with. In my screenshot, there is a row of various images with numbers underneath them that represent different items that you can gain or lose.
- The heart represents your health. Each turn, your health is lowered by at least one point. Once you reach a more advanced age, you begin to lose two points of health each turn. Health can be regained by resting in a building or grasslands. Aside from aging, health can be lost by partaking in risky activities such as joining the army, brawling, or any other violent activity.
- The fist represents your strength or physical hardiness. As you can see, my strength in that particular session was quite low, meaning that I did not have the capability to gain anything by choosing violent action over peaceful ones. Strength is useful for a wide variety of things and can be gained most easily by hunting in the forest—an activity than cannot fail.
- The music note is a bit harder to define, but if I had to label it as anything specific, it would probably be your charisma. It can be gained by befriending locals, meditating in the mountains, or other charismatic ventures (such as shmoozing at inns). It is a very good stat to build as it is the primary stat in persuading others to join your kingdom.
- The next two icons (the pile of logs and the coin) are pretty self-explanatory. In the game, anything you want to build requires wood (gained by chopping down trees—an action that will remove a forest square). Many other actions involving independent or foreign buildings require you to have some spending money. Money can be acquired by working at various places or by selling lumber. Earning money is quite difficult, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
- The trio of people is how many followers you currently have. Followers are people loyal to you that are not tied to specific places in your very small kingdom. They can be sent on errands for you and are generally very useful. However, some errands have a significant chance of your follower not returning, so it is important to make sure that you are using them wisely.
- Lastly, the house represents how many plots of land are currently in your possession. When you build something, it is empty until you send someone to live in it. Plowing a field is all well and good, but unless you have someone there to act as its owner and caretaker, it is useless.
Each turn ends when you choose to make an action for yourself. The time span between turns is exactly one year, meaning that if you choose to shmooze at an inn, the owners have to put up with you for an entire year of your respective existences. Once you gain followers, you can send them to do various things, but the turn will be over once you choose what you, yourself, are going to do. It’s very important to decide carefully what each turn will consist of because you cannot cancel an action once you have committed to it.
Of course, the game includes consequences for actions such as building or loitering in the lands of the neighbouring monarch. Constructing a building is considered an offense and you will be notified when guards from the nearest monarch are on their way. You can evade them, but they will eventually catch up to your location if you do not move around frequently. Likewise, hanging around inside the neighbouring land’s borders also draws the attention of guards and they will pursue you (even after you have gone back into unclaimed/your land).
Earning money is something I found to be immensely difficult. As you can see, the cost of doing certain actions is not cheap. A 5 gold-coin drink may not seem like much, but when an entire year’s worth of labour is only worth 1 gold coin, you start to seriously begin to reconsider many actions. Followers can be sent off to do labour for you, but they will not earn more than you would if you were working.
Since I don’t want to spoil too much of the fun, I’ll leave my discussion of mechanics and format at that. Again, I encourage you to try the game out for yourself!
I am not sure if it is possible to win this game.
After going through a number of sessions, each one with a different approach, I was left very stumped. There may be something to the subtitle that kind of hints at victory being impossible, but it may be that the game is just very difficult. With a fairly limited lifespan and such a small rate of resource acquisition, it is nothing to underestimate. Your end goal is, I suppose, building a castle. Castles are very costly to build when it comes to acquiring lumber—even when you have a number of followers collecting lumber with you. It still takes time to find more wood to use and you are forced to steal wood from the forests of the neighbouring monarch (which is punishable).
I went into my first session grossly underestimating the difficulty of the game and, subsequently, didn’t make it very far. In my latest session, I managed to build a castle after doing nothing but scouring the map for forests, but I was well into my forties and had spent so much time and effort on collecting lumber that I was old and had very little strength or charisma. So, after a failed attempt at charming the realm, I died.
That being said, I would love to hear of your experience with the game. Did you manage to become the monarch of the realm? Let me know in a comment!
As for where I’ve been in the last few months, work has really kept me busy and I haven’t had much time to try new games. If I have, I’ve lacked the motivation to sit down and play them. It’s disheartening for me when I look at the promises I made in December/early January of reviews that never came.
For that reason, I didn’t feel compelled to write anything celebrating the second anniversary of this blog’s creation (May 4th, by the way). So much has happened in my life over the two years I’ve been running this blog. I graduated, moved into an apartment, got a job, and now I’m just trying to stay afloat and keep my life balanced. I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation lately and most of the game time I’ve had has been dedicated to Sims or Mass Effect Andromeda (which I had decided would be something I wouldn’t review). So, I don’t know if all of this rambling is to say that I’m back or that I’m making a “grand return,” but I’m going to try to get back into this now that I’m more settled at my job.
Thank you for reading this if you made it this far!
juliameadows 