The first thing I need to tell you about The King is Watching is that, due to an unusual font and my poor eyesight, I originally though the game was called The King is Hatching.
And that kind of fits, really. This is an odd game, definitely odd enough to see you conjure royalty from a shell. The king in question is a fat golden eye wedged up high in the sky. And the king is also a startled red-faced figure staring out of the promotional artwork. Springing from an egg would be fairly normal behaviour for this fellow.
Even so, The King is Watching also works as a title, I guess. Actually, it gets right to the brilliant core of this brilliant game. The King is Watching is a blend of city builder and tower defence. You fill the tiles of your town with buildings that create the resources you’ll need to raise warriors. These warriors then go outside the walls and keep everyone safe from wave after wave of horrors who are headed your way. All great. But the twist is that the buildings in your town only generate resources when the king is watching them. And the king can’t watch everything.
At first, in fact, he can watch a total of three different buildings. For the first moments of your first game, you’ll be moving this strange little L-shaped mask of focus around your emerging town and, sure enough, only the tiles within it do anything. When the king is watching, wells produce water and forests produce wood. Move the mask elsewhere and all of that ceases.
This means that you need to be thinking of two things even at points when most games of this type want you to think about one thing. It’s not enough to just build your town, you need to think about which parts of it you want to operate at any moment. This means you’re constantly thinking about what you want to make next – new buildings? new troop types? – and where the king needs to be looking in order for that to happen.
And this in turn means you need to think about where you place things in the town. Put three wells in an L shape, for example, and the king will generate a lot of water when he’s focused on them (ah, the joys of a game that makes you type things like this), but wouldn’t it be better to diversify your interests a little? How about a well for water, a field for wheat and a market to turn some of the wheat into gold?
All of this matters because enemies are constantly on the march towards your town, ready to raze it to the ground. You can keep track of their progress via a little panel at the top of the screen – another thing for you, rather than the king, to keep your eye on – and when they arrive you need to make sure you have an army in place to keep them from your gates.
Battles aren’t just about resource planning, though. Over the course of a game you can unlock various magic spells that allow you to intervene in the action more directly, slowing enemies down, turning them into sheep, doing extra damage, that kind of stuff. Again, it’s another thing for you to think about, and by this point you’re probably getting an understanding of the kinds of concepts that The King is Watching wants you to be obsessed with.
Most notably: you can’t be everywhere at once, but it would be really helpful if you could. This is a game about noise and distractions, or rather it’s about deciding which vital life-preserving signals you can choose to treat as noise and distractions at any particular moment. No enemies on the horizon for the time being? Sort your town out and stockpile resources. Buy new building types, knock down old buildings that aren’t working for you anymore, expand into new tiles a little and maybe even level up the overall area of your king’s gaze. But when enemies and bosses appear outside the gates, it’s time to put all that stuff aside and make sure you can place your full attention on the ensuing battle.
This is clever, taxing, morish stuff, and the game’s key ideas are wonderfully mounted in a kind of Roguelite structure that sees games unfolding as individual runs that can last anything from ten minutes to the best part of an hour. Because the basics are so simple – build and defend – the game can throw in all kinds of complications, such as a brilliant system that gives you leeway in arranging some of the order in which your enemies will attack. I’m still early in with The King is Watching, in other words, and I still find cool new concepts in every single run.
But that distraction thing – moving the king’s attention, hastily selecting constructions, checking my magic spells are ready and keeping a weather eye on the horizon? It’s familiar. It’s so familiar, in fact. It’s watching Netflix while scrolling TikTok and listening to an audiobook. It’s handling dinner while making lunchboxes and ensuring the dog gets fed. Life, as a wise young man once said, moves pretty fast. And The King is Watching understands this innately.
