Play This Game: Kingsgrave (2024)
This RPG-lite mixes inspiration from Zelda with some simplified but satisfying survival mechanics and Dark Souls vibes
While I’m continuing my slow and steady survey of RPG history, I wanted to also have a way to recommend newer releases that I’ve been playing. So to kick that off, let’s take a look at Kingsgrave, an action-adventure with light RPG elements that just launched in April.
In Kingsgrave, players take on the role of—you may have guessed this—a king. Specifically, a king who has been slumbering and presumed dead for an extended period. While the big guy in charge napped, the kingdom has collapsed. The king’s subjects are spread far and wide, monsters now roam the land, and all the buildings, roads, and bridges have fallen into disrepair.
Finally awoken by a mysterious voice, the king must go on a journey to rescue his loyal subjects, restore the land, and reclaim the power necessary to thwart whatever deep evil has taken root. In mechanical terms, that means exploring the world from a top-down perspective akin to the 8- and 16-bit Legend of Zelda games, the clearest inspiration that Kingsgrave showcases.
It’s not all Zelda, though. The game’s dark story and dreary world recalls Dark Souls and other From Software classics, while progress in the game often plays out in way that feels almost like a super stripped-down version of survival games like Minecraft or Valheim.
As the king explores the land and rescues more people, he’s able to reassemble buildings, which in turn give him access to new tools. For example, one of the rescued may be able to operate as a blacksmith, but it’s not enough to simply return him to his smithy and be given a sword. No, you’ll need to provide wood and stone, which require their own tools to harvest. Kingsgrave never goes down the path of a full-on survival game—a fact I’m grateful for, as I often struggle to get into those—but it certainly has a smidgen of that genre’s material-based grindiness to it.
Don’t get too scared off by the word “grind,” though. It never took me too terribly long to find the ingredients I needed for each new upgrade, or to scour the map for the next path to explore after earning a new tool. In fact, one of Kingsgrave’s greatest strengths, in my opinion, is how briskly it moves. I completed the game in just over six hours, with only a smattering of optional stuff to track down.
One caveat, however: Don’t go into Kingsgrave expecting a particularly well-developed RPG system. There are RPG mechanics to the game; specifically, the king can spend some of his materials earned from slaying monsters to power up specific weapons or magic abilities. The skill trees these are unlocked from branch at a few points, forcing the player to make some decisions about what play style they want to prioritize.
That said, the skill upgrade system doesn’t seem particularly well-balanced for how short Kingsgrave is. I felt like I had barely made a dent in the number of unlocks by the time I beat the game, and unlocking everything would have required tons of mindless grinding just for the reward of being even stronger and even harder to kill when I already didn’t have a lot of trouble.
I would also caution that although I brought up the Dark Souls feel to the world, the combat is much more in the 16-bit Legend of Zelda style, by which I mean totally fine and serviceable but absolutely not the reason to play. The joy of Kingsgrave for me was in exploring its world, slowly rebuilding my kingdom’s population, and gaining access to new weapons and abilities that allowed me to explore even more. In that sense, it almost plays out more like a Metroidvania than a traditional RPG or action-RPG.
If you’ve got any nostalgia for old-school Zelda or if anything I’ve described here sounds of interest, though, Kingsgrave is absolutely worth checking out, especially as it’s available for a mere $10. The game comes courtesy of Egg or Chicken Games, a small team of less than ten developers which was established in 2022, and as far as I can tell this is their debut release. I’ve had trouble locating much more information about them, but if this really is their first game, I’ve got a lot of hope for what they might be able to do in the future.