I can feel it poised to happen: Kingdom Come 2: Deliverance is gonna hit big on Steam tomorrow when it launches. It's the perfect storm of largely great reviews (including ours), the appeal of a sprawling singleplayer RPG in an age of live-service games, and maybe even the rush to play and finish it before Civilization 7 and Obsidian's Avowed come out in rapid succession over the next couple of weeks.
But what should we do in the handful of hours before Kingdom Come 2: Deliverance actually releases on Steam this Tuesday? Just sit around waiting? Nah. How about another game about a kingdom, only in this one you're the king? As an added bonus, the demo is free, and it's also seriously fun.
In the demo of The King Is Watching, you've got a kingdom to run: wheat to harvest, gold to mine, soldiers to train. And it's all possible thanks to your hardworking peasants—not that you would ever literally thank the peasants, naturally, 'cuz you're a king—who toil in the fields, labor in the mines, and do battle with swarms of goblins trying to breach your walls.
There's a catch, though. Your peasants are only working hard when you're looking directly at them. Move your kingly gaze to another part of your kingdom, and it's breaktime until you glance back.
So, if you don't look at the wheat field, the wheat doesn't get harvested. If you don't stare at the army barracks, it won't produce soldiers. You know when your boss leaves the office early and everyone kicks back and opens TikTok for the rest of the day? This is That: The Game.
As the watchful king, you must place your buildings on a grid, making sure to group them for peak optimization, then focus your attention on the part of the grid you need to work the most. It's tricky: if goblins are approaching (and they almost always are) it makes sense to focus on the barracks, but the barracks need resources like wheat, so you can't simply ignore your farm. As you add more buildings to mine ore or research blueprints or train archers, things get more complicated, leaving you wishing you had another set of eyes in your kingly head to keep everything up and running.
It's tricky and fun, easy to get into yet hard to survive for long. The King Is Watching doesn't have a release date yet, a few quick rounds of the demo are just the ticket for spending a few enjoyable hours while waiting for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to launch.
