The King is Watching preview — All eyes on you

Developed by Hyponohead, The King is Watching is a strategic rogue-lite city builder that adds a twist or two to its genres. Despite just being just a demo at the moment, the Steam page sits at a whopping 97% positive, earning it an overwhelmingly positive review score. I was curious as to how this quaint city builder gained such acclaim, but boy, do I understand now. Let me explain.

You play as a watchful sovereign who rules over his kingdom, which is represented by a four-by-four grid (Set to become five-by-five when the game launches). Each space can be used for a single resource or building, and the whole kingdom is surrounded by protective walls. You see, every once in a while, a horde of enemies will attack your kingdom, so you’ll want your land to be both well defended and productive in order to repel attacks and hedge against the next one.

The overarching goal of the game is to keep your kingdom alive by defeating every wave before they can tear down your walls. You can always see the progress of the next horde via a progress bar at the top of your screen, and if you don’t defeat one wave quickly enough, the next will be on your doorstep to aid them. Needless to say, it’s imperative that you operate efficiently.

In order to grow your kingdom, you’ll plunk down a few improvements like wells, fields, and forests, which yield basic resources until they’re exhausted. After you get basic resources, you can start building huts to rally peasants to the kingdom’s defense. Once an army is secured, you’ll want to build a market to generate gold, a magic school for offensive and defensive spells, and place a research table to unlock other buildings and branch out into new economies with different benefits. The only problem here is that researching gives you the choice of three random buildings that might not fit into your economy or lend well to setting up for a strong late game.

It sounds rather straightforward and relatively easy, but there’s a catch: only the land the king is directly observing will be productive. Remember, the land is set up in a grid, so you might have improvements on four plots of land clustered in a square, but the king’s vision is in an L shape. Well, you can work three out of the four plots, and you can rotate your vision to change which areas are working, but you can’t get them all, so you need to prioritize what’s important. The theme of prioritizing what’s important at just about every level makes up the meat of the game, as time is never on your side, and the next horde is always approaching. This makes improving efficiency in your kingdom feel like a huge breath of fresh air, like by increasing your vision radius by up to three whole spaces, which will have cascading benefits to everything you do.

Ok, so we have a few basic ingredients working together now; you’ll want to grow the kingdom to defend the kingdom. Build resources, get more complex resources and buildings, hire new troops, and win the game by defeating the final boss wave. While that’s a strong gameplay loop on its own, what makes it really addictive are the roguelike/lite elements involved. You see, the waves aren’t completely randomized; you get to choose which groups of enemies you face, and the more difficult the foes, the better the reward. By defeating waves, you’ll earn upgrades to your kingdom’s buildings, better troops, relics with unique passives, spells to hamper your enemies, and a currency called Denarii, which can be used to buy all of the above at a shop that pops up periodically. At the same time, specific loot is attached to the wave of enemies you choose, so taking on higher difficulty waves isn’t necessarily better. You really have to consider the situation your kingdom is in when making your choice.

There are two major boss wave events. I found the second one easier, but I attribute that to survivorship bias. The first boss, a tanky ogre, effectively serves as a stat check. Did you slack on growing your meat shield of peasants? Did you fail to diversify your army away from being just a meat shield of peasants? Did you overlook a pivotal aspect of your economy’s supply chain? Well, this guy will punish you for it, likely resulting in a loss. I had one mind-numbing encounter where he wiped out my troops, then marched up to my wall where he and the trickle of reinforcements I threw at him wet noodled each other for what felt like ages. I won that encounter with one health left on my wall. Other times, he stomped me cleanly, and others I roundly beat him. Sometimes, it felt like you were dealt a bad hand, and there was little you could do. When you defeat him, there’s a lengthy break in the waves of attacks, which grants players a nice moment to savor their victory, recover their forces, and make some progress.

Moving on, the second boss fight is a dragon, and if you’ve made it that far, there’s a good chance you have the stats to outright beat him, as I did on the first attempt against him. He has a health bar divided into four chunks, and after each is depleted, he takes off, breathing fire down upon your troops, likely killing them instantly. After that, you have a brief reprieve before he lands again, starting the process over. After he’s slain, you’ve won the level, of which there is only one right now. Alternatively, you could choose to enter endless mode and see how far you can get. Honestly, despite some janky difficulty, I look forward to facing new bosses in the full release.

Let's dive deeper into your loyal troops, who will stop at nothing to vanquish the foes of your realm. To start, you have a single swordsman guarding your castle. He’s fierce, but he’ll be needing some backup. Peasant huts allow you to rally peasants to the cause, so long as you have enough wheat to recruit them. From there, you can add various buildings that allow you to recruit mages, tanky militia men, rending swordsmen, archers, and even more unique troops like madmen, who use hit and run tactics. It’s important to note that you can’t directly control your troops, as they automatically attack their enemies. You would think with roles like tanks, archers, and damage dealers, that a greater degree of control would be necessary, but honestly, everyone fell into their place on the battlefield rather naturally.

When it comes to logistics, there are no costs to sustain your army outside of the upfront price of recruitment, but there is a troop limit that can be increased through upgrades. In addition, while the cost to produce a troop might not be high, the buildings they’re recruited from might need a material that requires other materials to make. For example, a recruitment building for catapults requires metal, which requires ore and a building to refine that ore into metal. That’s three plots of land out of the 16 you have available to make one type of defender. Of course, you could hire swordsmen with the base ore, double dipping in your supply chain, but the high upfront cost and land use could prevent you from branching out into other troop types, like mages.

As determined as your army is, they might need a helping hand. Lucky for them, there are certain buildings which can provide aid. A hospital can heal them while it’s active, an arena can boost their morale, which gives them an attack damage buff, and a tesla tower can harass enemies with lightning. Or, you could take a more direct approach and use those spells I mentioned earlier; such powers include summoning meteorites to crash down on the battlefield, tearing a rift in the earth, creating healing zones, or turning the invaders into sheep (up to three at a time!).

Further adding to the variation in runs are random events. Every once in a while, you’ll get a pop-up with the goings-on of the kingdom. You might stumble across a slacking peasant or have to deal with a growing cult. You’ll be given a few options on how to deal with these problems, each of which grants a different reward. Notice how I said reward, as your choices aren’t usually dilemmas with some massive cost, which is nice given that the base gameplay offers enough challenge. If there were consequences, I didn’t notice them.

Beyond the moment-to-moment choices, there’s meta-progression, which grants stronger starts to your runs with upgrades like increasing your starting troop limit, starting with more gold, and making one of your tiles extra productive. There are also more horizontal forms of progression, like new troops, relics, and buildings. The whole skill tree is under the “upgrades” tab of the progression building in the menu, and there are three additional trees unavailable in the demo. To top it off, there are a whopping six tabs in the progression building, but only the skill tree tab is fleshed out. You can, however, take a sneak peek at the Council tab, which looks like it will allow you to recruit members to give you buffs.

Let's take a detour from the gameplay to talk about the aesthetics of The King is Watching. The art style is pixelated yet refined and inspired. Spell effects are clearly displayed, icons for resources are accurate and intuitive, and the sprites for both your army and enemies are quite nice on the creative. In addition, the side characters like the shop keep and prophecy lady are impressively detailed and wonderful to examine.

As of right now, the gameplay selection screen has no text in the UI, just a vibrant vista of your kingdom with various buildings to click on. Still, even without any text to infer which building is which, the art style guides players towards the important buildings. In all likelihood, a new player will notice the giant golden eyeball surrounded by an equally golden spiked halo, which serves as the level select.

The music is also worth noting. The background music is calming, which is perfect for taking the edge off of the high stakes management. That is, until it changes into a more bombastic form of itself when a horde is approaching. The sound design is also quite good; plunking down improvements on your land is accompanied by the tolling of a bell, which is a nice touch.

Overall, The King is Watching is an incredibly promising indie gem. The gameplay loop is deep and addictive, if not a little unfair at times. It might be a little rough around the edges in some regards right now, but fret not, humble peasant, the developers seem to have a strong idea of what they want the game to be, and they’re actively listening to the community’s feedback. I’d definitely be keeping an eye on this one if I were you.