The King is Watching
The King is Watching did gangbusters during the same Steam Next Fest that Skin Deep was in earlier this year. We were particularly clued into that Next Fest because we were tracking Skin Deep's performance within the various rankings, so I'd taken a good long look at it back then.
I played the full version this weekend... it's extremely good!! There are so many wave-based autobattler games out there right now, and this one has heavy overlap with some of the concepts and fantasies in 9 Kings, but it's still unique and interesting and enjoyable in its own way.
It also looks great. There are some really strange, wordless interactive sequences that lean heavily on kind of arresting, grotesque pixel art, and the menu art is kind of rainbowy and lurid in a way that I enjoy:
The runs are pretty similar to 9 Kings - you start with a grid of squares which can each take a single production building. Each one might be making units, collecting resources, buffing other squares or systems, etc. unlike 9 Kings, which is a turn-based game, the squares produce units and resources in real time.
However, only a subset of those squares can be active at any moment. You've got a cursor which can highlight between 3 and 6 of those squares - this represents your "gaze" - and usually, only the buildings under the cursor do anything.
So you've got to place your buildings wisely and make sure that you make it as easy as possible to keep a high uptime on your various resource dependencies. You've gotta lay everything out so that you can pump out ingredients and units fast enough to make sure that you're fully stocked with Guys every time a wave of enemies approaches (also in real-time).
Like a lot of these games, you earn some kind of currency from each run, and use it to buy upgrades, which have a substantial impact on your ability to survive to the end of a run, etc etc etc - something I now expect in all of these games and have had to force myself to be at peace with, haha. It's not too bad in this game - a lot of the unlocks are new buildings, new kings with different specialties, or "advisors" who can be equipped for specific stat boosts, so it's not just flat power-boosting.
I do enjoy the split-attention thing going on with this game. You've got to watch both halves of the screen and make decisions about where to place your "gaze" depending on what units you're trying to build, how the battle is going, what mid-match upgrades you're going for next, and so on. I've enjoyed a lot of games about aggressively splitting your attention - Serpentes, one of my long-time favorites, is about the exact same thing.
TKIW is pretty good at making sure that your gaze-management is significant without requiring a lot of silly micro. Your gaze starts off in a very inconvenient little 3-square L shape which must be very frequently adjusted. By the end of a run, you'll probably have a 2x3 rectangle. Most of the good units you can unlock by the end of the game will require enough strange resources that you'll probably not be able to conveniently group everything under the big rectangle, so I found that I was moving my gaze around about as often at the end of a match as at the beginning.
I've barely touched the upgrade tree at this point, but I think I can see myself playing a lot more of this and eventually getting to the upgrades which make the play area bigger and allow me to build even stranger units. There seems to be a kind of dragon made out of wheat flour, which can be baked into a more dangerous dragon in some kind of kiln? Achieving this is my next personal goal.
There is also a wordless and strange little narrative element where your king (who does not actually seem to be the same king you play as during the matches? Since he's a lot meaner?) is doing strange and unpleasant magical things like drinking from chalices and killing nobles with a cut lily stem. I'm curious to see where that goes.