It's only been a few months since I wrote about the excellent 9 Kings, a roguelike 'Kingdom Sim' that had you juggling base-building with tower defence. Now I am here to write about another member of the same deeply-specific genre that is also excellent: The King Is Watching.
The deal here is very similar! You pick a King and make "runs" through the game, unlocking more stuff every time so that your subsequent runs are easier/more interesting. You have to juggle one side of your screen being about building placement, adjacency bonuses and the gathering of resources, while the other has bad guys constantly turning up to try to kill you. It even has a very cool pixel art thing going on.
But within the confines of that deeply-specific genre, these games are pretty different! Where 9 Kings was a very quickfire experience, The King Is Watching is a deeper, more sedate strategy game, with a much wider variety of buildings to choose from, way more resources to gather (and juggle) and more things you can research and trade.
I'm not saying this to compare them quantitatively (oh, this one has more, so it's better), but to say that the elegance with which The King Is Watching ties everything into its central mechanic–only the limited number of buildings that you're "watching" will generate resources, basically an Eye Of Sauron for a labour force–works a treat. Were this just a resource-gathering x tower defence game on its own, with its pleasant visuals and variety of stuff on offer, I'd probably have had a good time! But having to juggle all that and make sure my buildings are placed in such a way that I can watch certain types at certain times, making sure my "gaze" is powerful enough that it can oversee six buildings instead of three at a time, turns this into my favourite type of chin-scratcher.
There's no wrong way to play this! But I can't find a right way either. Every game has this wonderful tension to it, where I always feel like I'm doing well enough to survive, but never like I've perfected my build, a constant pull between doing well enough to progress but always feeling like I could do, and learn, more.
Which is the whole point of a game like this in a genre like this, so...well done, The King Is Watching, you absolutely nailed the brief.
