Kingdom: New Lands

Kingdom: New Lands is a passive pixel art roguelite kingdom-building simulator that is probably best played on a mobile device. As the ruler of the Kingdom, you begin the game with a horse and a handful of coins at a campsite. You can give coins to beggars to turn them into citizens, who can then be assigned jobs. Builders can expand and fortify your kingdom, archers can protect it and hunt for game, which result in coins, and farmers can till the land for coins. At night monsters called greedlings attack your camp. They can break the fortifications and hit citizens, returning them to beggar status. If they hit the ruler, the ruler drops a coin which they steal. If you have no coins left, they will steal your crown, and its game over. Your goal is to find and repair the shipwreck on the island, and once your people move it to the sea you can continue on to the next island. The game is won when you finish the fifth island.

This game was recommended to me and had been on my list for years, so I wanted to like it, but it’s an incredibly passive game and it ended up being somewhat boring. There is no way to actively assign or cancel tasks, so if you accidentally mark a tree for destruction too close to nightfall you can lose a builder because the AI will send them to cut the tree down even though it’s too dangerous to leave the camp. The greedlings attack from whichever side is closest to the greedling portal and those attacks get really aggressive, especially during a blood moon, and it’s not uncommon to have a bunch of archers milling around on the wrong side of the camp, doing nothing, while the portal-side is being viciously destroyed.

Some players have put an incredible amount of hours into this game and talk about the depth of the strategy, but unfortunately most of the strategy is just resource management that compensates for the fact the player has very little actual control over the environment. Being unable to cancel tasks, for example, seems a lot more like developer oversight than a design choice for the sake of strategy. Strategy ends up being investing a lot into archers, keeping fortifications tight and focusing on the void side, and micro-managing builders. Oh, and waiting. There’s a good bit of waiting. Since this is a roguelite, a lot of the difficulty depends on the island generated. If you start on an island with several beggar camps nearby and the shipwreck is close your game will be much easier than if you have to travel far to recruit citizens and build the ship.

Just to put the nail in the coffin, the game also has a significant number of dumb cheevs that require the player to perform specific acts that seem arbitrarily chosen, at least from my perspective having played a few hours. Don’t start the camp until the third day, for example. Hunt 20 or more deer by the fourth day. It’s unsurprising far more players get the “win the game” achievement than most of the others.

I read a review that said if you don’t love this game by the second hour, you probably never will, and I think that’s a good assessment.