The King is Watching (2025)

The King is Watching is an interesting roguelite where you control a little city, and you must manage resource production in order to repel waves of enemy monsters. Part of its premise revolves around the fact that even as you make buildings in your city, production only occurs where your king's "gaze" is actively on.

This presents an interesting aspect of strategy. In order to succeed, you must figure out how to layout your buildings in such a way where you can efficiently produce resources, soldiers, spells, etc. to keep up with the enemies. You also have the option to "forecast" more dangerous enemy waves in return for stronger rewards.

Unfortunately, as the title of this review indicates, The King is Watching has a massive amount of metaprogression. When you start the game, your 5x5 grid of city buildings only actually has a 4x4 grid unlocked. In order to unlock the following 9 buildings, as well as a massive amount of other metaprogression upgrades, you must unlock those over time. This effectively means your first few runs will essentially be impossible - each time, I made it to the final boss without too much trouble, but I repeatedly lost to the massive power spike in difficulty it had. Grinding metaprogression upgrades was the only solution, but even to beat just the first boss required multiple runs of pure grinding.

Additionally, though each run sees you choosing to invest in different building or infantry types, they don't really end up feeling different. All that really matters is you commit to one of them. As a result, many runs just feel, frankly, boring.

I don't recommend this one - I'd look to something like Against the Storm as an example of a city builder roguelite done better.