Kingsway is an RPG with an interesting concept; What if everything in the game was represented by Operating System elements? Bags as folders, different pages of the UI (stats, skills, etc.) represented by various programs on your desktop; Blue screen when you die, and more. I wasn’t entirely satisfied by my experience, feeling that the core gameplay loop wasn’t satisfying enough and that the whole “OS RPG” paradigm wasn’t pushed far enough for me.
The core loop of the game is as follows; You create a character, try to light up some braziers across a procedurally generated map while fighting monsters, complete quests and get new items and skills for your character. When you die, you get some jewels and restart from the beginning and you are able to spend those to unlock new items and effects, cosmetic tweaks for the game and even keyboard shortcuts. As a roguelike, it works fairly well, but I never felt like I was doing progress and accumulating more power to make my character stronger, so dying and restarting didn’t feel like I was making gains in some grander meta-game.
The battle system is pretty straightforward, you have a few actions based on your skills and you usually click buttons (such as attack), wait for a meter to fill up (to complete your attack) and try to get the enemy’s health to 0 before yours does so. By defeating enemies you get items that you can equip in various character slots (like weapons, armors, rings, etc.) or sell for money, or experience that makes you level up, letting you place stat points and learn skills. Enemies sometimes have little gimmicks, like special attacks that are basically popups going across your screen but fighting otherwise feels dull and the connections with the game being in an operating system feels a bit lost.
There are some neat touches here and there, like locations you visit feeling like old websites, the wide range of skills the various character classes can use - even if they do not really mix with the ‘computer-y’ theme at all - but after doing three runs of the game, I feel like I’ve seen much of everything, without any sign that the next run will be different or more interesting. I kinda wish you could buy permanent upgrades for your characters instead of unlocking boosts that you have to select one of.
Kingsway is certainly interesting and certainly very competent! It had potential and I was curious to see where the whole motif of the game would go, but I was ultimately left hungry for something more to keep me playing. It’s still a neat game for sure, but the novelty didn’t manage to overcome the feeling of repetitiveness that overcame me pretty quickly.
