I’ve spent a lot of time in the indie game Queen’s Domain, 65 hours to be precise, having seen everything there is to see. It’s a game that purposefully evokes FromSoftware’s King’s Field, the first person dungeon crawler series that spiritually preceded Demon’s Souls. It does this with its obvious name, how it initially presents its combat, and even the graphic design of its logo and art. It uses that chunky, pixelated indie design that hovers between not quite PS1 and definitely not PS2, that so many games like Arctic Eggs and Mouthwashing strive for. It is full of skeleton warriors, swinging swords, and hidden doors you can open with a button press and a bit of intuition.
Queen's Domain contains many fantastic bug hybrids and skeletons.
This comparison to King’s Field is, however, a bit of a sleight of hand. What it starts off as and what it becomes are wildly different; the game mutates multiple times. Though the initial hours on an island do bear a strong resemblance to King’s Field 2 (which was confusingly brought over as King’s Field in America), Queen’s Domain is a game that pulls from games like Metroid Prime and well as other first person platformers. It also is clearly indebted to FromSoftware’s other work, specifically the first Dark Souls game and Elden Ring, especially in the way it lays out its map.
Warning: this blog contains minor structural and level spoilers for Queen's Domain.
Everyone loves taking inspiration from FromSoftware, but rarely is it done well. Designers always focus on the encounter design, the soul run, dodge rolling and parrying. (I’d argue Lies of P remains one of the few to say something new there.) But few studios really try to match their level design and few, including FromSoftware itself, have ever matched specifically how tightly the original Dark Souls fit together. Though elements of this intricate clockwork design have existed in other FromSoftware games since, none matched that feeling of turning a corner after fighting though a tough dungeon and realizing you know exactly where you are, that you’ve been here before, that it all fits together.
Queen’s Domain does that for its entire world. It fills itself with hidden doors and elevators that extend to the very roots of the world. The more I’ve played it, the more I appreciate how much staggering thought and craft went into its construction. The scale of the game starts reasonably, an island with a few large buildings and an island temple to the side. It’s a fantastic little opening zone as it incrementally doles out tiny new shortcuts and feeds you new mechanics like a baby bird. But as you go deeper and deeper inside the world, you begin to see how big the game can actually get.
My trip to Hell
Queen’s Domain is full of shortcuts, and you are not ready for all of them. The area around the surface has a handful of obscured entryways to the later areas of the game that you can find with a tiny bit of digging. If you force your way in early, you will likely be destroyed almost instantly by a chimera or a half ant half deer monstrosity. One of these shortcuts is particularly sadistic, the one to an area called the Rotting Cavern. The entrance is obscured near a temple and requires you to dash to a distant platform, force your way past some enemies in a dark crypt, and jump down a hole into a rotten, inverted tree. At the bottom is a save point, and if you use it before you have the means to warp to a teleporter, you will be stuck there. This exact thing happened to me, and I loved it.
Functionally the Rotting Cavern it is indistinguishable from Hell. It’s an underground lake made almost entirely of a boiling liquid that is something between blood and lava and gushes from the mouths of serpent statues. The statues cannot be immediately harmed, as they are protected by some kind of force field that you will not be able to deactivate until the end of the game. The area is patrolled by disgusting fish and twisted mountains of bipedal flesh. The most annoying foe of all in the area, and one that ranks among the most annoying in the game, is called a “Perverted Mass of Warped Flesh.” These are yellow flying sacks that shoot the same kind of beams at you as the angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion. You can bypass the beams with a quick lateral movement, but there are often multiples of them in the same area, and that kind of movement is tricky if you are also trying to not be boiled to death in blood. These disgusting freaks can be killed with ranged weapons, and if you are trying to survive the area then methodically killing each of these guys is required.
Sick of this little pervert.
I was trapped down there for hours. If you come to the Rotting Cavern via the shortcut, there is no clear exit save for running through the lake of fire towards a structure that is, it turns out, a teleporter. One method to get out is to save up as much as you can for potions, dispatch as many enemies as you can at range, and then book it through the boil while chugging healing items. I attempted this, and it would have perhaps been reasonable had I been even remotely close to the range the zone was scaled for (I’d say the area is comfortable around level 60; I was level 25.). The game has a bestiary it fills out when you kill any of the 188 potential monsters, and you know it’s a bad sign when that number suddenly jumps from 33 to 161.
For a while I farmed the perverted masses, as it turns out they were a fantastic source of experience points and could be taken one at a time safely albeit slowly. I assumed that is how I would finally leave, sent to an unreasonable punishment in the underworld only to grind my way until I could escape this purgatory. It turns out there is another solution; the creators of the game are not unreasonable. It’s not immediately apparent and you have to really look closely, and it also requires a ton of panicked running through equally terrifying and strange areas you will not be ready for for a while. Eventually, I escaped.
I respect that Queen’s Domain not only allowed me to get way over my skis, but that the entire area was seemingly designed as a trap specifically for this exact situation to occur. There is a chance you may never get to the Rotting Cavern this way, or this early. Many hours later I now know the world’s map inside and out, having collected every secret there is to collect. I know the switchbacks and shortcuts; I know how to bypass half the world with a single jump. I was unprepared for how large this game ended up being, a nice indie surprise in the vein of Beyond Citadel and Blue Prince. But more than even the scale, I’m frankly staggered by how well everything just fits together.
