Queen’s Domain: The Brilliant King’s Field-Inspired RPG That Makes You Walk Before You Can Fly

I would also have accepted “Prince’s Place” or “Baron’s Turf”

FromSoftware’s elderly King’s Field games aren’t really celebrated for their feeling of agility. They are glorious first-person trudgefests, a treacle-thick waltz of swinging and spellcraft, with players wobbling in and out of attack range like British men who aren’t sure whether the other man wants a hug. Unlike in the later Gelap Souls action-RPGs, to which King’s Field owes some of its retrospective popularity, there’s no dodge-roll to grease the wheels.

Out this week on Steam, Queen’s Domain is often as ponderous as King’s Field, but it’s also an exercise in steady, triumphant acceleration. Ultimately, it wants you to fly. To this end, it equips you – well, once you’ve boshed a huge skeleton sentinel – with a fancy windblade that lets you perform an aerial dash, speeding your manouevres while allowing you to reach new areas.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Future Friends Game

You’ll find socketable gems that extend the dash, gradually bringing offshore islands and collapsed castle parapets within reach. I’m around four hours into Queen’s Domain, and right now, the overall objective is tricking out that enchanted blade: heading down one leg of a marvellous, knotty world, retrieving a gem, and returning along another path, while keeping an eye out for nooks and platforms that once seemed like cordoned-off backdrop.

While an obvious quick-select default, the windblade doesn’t make the 50 or so other weapons in the game obsolete, partly because enemies are distinguished by damage type: skellingtons are tougher against swords, while spears tend to bounce off malformed rodent ladybugs. All the weapons level up with use, and all of them have special abilities: the first spear you acquire has a retreating stab, useful against grasshopper chickens with lunging kicks, while the basic wooden club has a pounce move, skipping the lengthy swinging animation that is the weapon’s major disadvantage.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Future Friends Game

For all these flourishes, combat is often as reassuringly stodgy as I remember King’s Field being on the early PlayStation consoles. The pace is set by the need to charge your attacks, holding the button till the wind-up consumes your whole stamina bar; spamming blows is much less efficient.

350 words in, and I haven’t mentioned the standout attraction in Queen’s Domain – the landscape itself, an absurdly lovely expanse of mossy arches, chopped pillars and racked tombs that evokes Shadow of the Colossus and Vagrant Story as much as it does FromSoftware. It’s a beautiful place, a haunting recovery of PS2 aesthetics that runs comfortably on integrated graphics. Or at least, it’s beautiful until you start screwing around with focal length and lurid filters in the Photo Mode (see below).

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Future Friends Game

The archipelago’s interwoven paths are structured around save crystals where you can rest at the price of respawning enemies, but unlike in Souls, enemies eventually respawn of their own accord, appearing in different combinations as you pass certain milestones.

If this last wrinkle creates more potential for ambush, you can shape encounters using your secondary weapons, beginning with a belt of throwing daggers hanging from a shipwreck. I specify the location because embarrassingly, I managed to overlook them for the first hour – in general, Queen’s Domain doesn’t highlight collectible objects as flagrantly as certain recent blockbusters.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Future Friends Game

You get an endless supply of daggers, governed by a cooldown. The best thing about them initially is that you can use them to murder the highly annoying laser eyeballs that deck the tree trunks, often zapping you in the back while you’re battling something else. Beyond that, you’ll use them to bait individuals away from mobs, luring them towards killzones with plenty of strafing room, or getting them jammed behind monoliths so that you can bop their noggins at leisure.

According to developers Freshly Baked, I still have over 30 hours of Queen’s Domain left to burn. Unlike with many of the non-review titles I’ve dipped into this year, I feel I might actually go the distance. Lebih banyak thoughts to follow, possibly! If you’re new to King’s Field-alikes, you may find them stifling and frustrating at first. Even if you do know your King’s Fields, you’ll likely perish a lot. But hopefully, the landscape’s magnificence and the increasing swagger of the combat system will get you over the hump. The game launches tomorrow, and there’s still a demo on Steam as of writing.