Kingsgrave (2024)

Beated and 100%ed (except for an achievement for "take damage from thorns 10 times" which i have 0/10 on ??? i recall one area with thorn plants and i did actually run into them to see if they did damage but they didn't so i have no clue what this is)

Actually, I went in and fought the final boss before getting 100%, which I usually wouldn't do, but I had no clue how to get the things I was missing and hoped maybe the dungeon would help me with that, but no, the big gate with the point of no return warning was, in fact, just the final boss and that's it. But I scoured the map again after that and figured out the spots I missed. You can't fight the boss again after that so maybe I missed a true ending, idk! The game barely has a plot anyway!

The game was alright. I was kinda hoping I'd get really hooked on its resource-progression system but if anything, the world was almost... too intricate to get into? Like, y'know, the best way to be hooked is when like "oh there's this one thing, idk how I'm gonna get it, but when I do it will be satisfying" but in this game there's just always ten things and so its like "well if i can't get this thing i'll just pick another direction to go in and i'll be able to get a thing there". Like, I said every room has a progression resource or ability or etc in it, but when every room has something, it's kinda like no room has anything... y'know? Until you finally get stuck and then you have no idea where the one spot you're missing is. Idk, I'm nitpicking. It's a neat little game if you enjoy piecing a giant map together one room and one upgrade at a time and don't care if the combat is kinda tedious.

But wait until they fix the glitches and the UI maybe or you're going to get annoyed that you keep returning to the main menu or respawning monsters by accident because you can't tell what menu prompt is currently highlighted.

Mmm... video games... Today I am playing Kingsgrave, an indie game that just came out yesterday.

Maybe I'm just unfamiliar with whatever genre this is, but it's pretty unique. It says its Zelda-like, well, kind of. It's a biiiig overworld to explore, but it's very much about resource-gathering and ability-gating. Clear this room to get this key, go back to that room which contains 5 iron, 5 iron lets you build the forge so you can make a spear, the spear lets you hit this switch in the other room so you can go through there and get 3 villagers, etc. There's never a moment where you're just, like, battling through a dungeon for a dozen rooms to get an item. Every single new room has a progression item. These resources are all limited, you find them once and that's it. So if the next upgrade requires 20 iron, you can't just reload the iron mine over and over to get what you need, you have to explore and find the exact rooms with a one-use iron mine.

So for me I like this because I like metroidvania-style gameplay where there's a big interconnected world that you fill in slowly. I'm struggling a bit with the game right now though because the map is so big and while I've explored most of it, I'm stuck right now because I can't find either a) some sort of bucket item which I think I can fill with oil to burn down some malignant growths in my way...? or b) something that lets me deal damage to ghosts. I think I've been everywhere on the map, but there must be 1 or 2 spots that had a gate I couldn't get by, that have the items I need, but I can't remember where they are...

The game is kind of buggy (I've encountered three bugs so far) and some of the UI is, like... really not good... So while I hate to put down an indie game on its release date, idk, I hope it gets some updates. But it's pretty fun and I like the intricate design of the world!