Kingdom Two Crowns: A Tense Reflection

Kingdom Two Crowns is the third installation in the Kingdom series, a resource management/tower defense/roguelike/exploration indie game, created by  Thomas "Noio" van den Berg and development studio Coatsink and originally published in 2018. Despite the surprisingly long slash-appended list above that makes this game sound like an exciting high-speed kingdom adventure romp, it is exactly not that. Kingdom Two Crowns is a slow, quiet, frightening soak in some of the most gorgeous pixel landscapes I've seen in gaming in quite some time. Let's take a closer look.

Kingdom Two Crowns has had quite a few content updates since its original release, so even the 'base' game comes with more challenges, quests and options at the beginning than you'd expect. The basic game loop is classic: simply settling an area, building up your base, recruiting villagers, and pushing back the dangerous monsters, then moving to the next island. However, unlike Starbound, Minecraft, Necesse or Terraria, Kingdom's stroke of genius is its beautiful simplicity.

As you choose your character and your setting (I started with Shogun, the feudal Japan skin for the game), you are given almost zero instruction. There is barely any in-game text. There is absolutely zero on-screen user interface other than a little bag in the corner that will become your very good friend.

This game is played with the arrow keys. That's it. In a throwback to games like Super Mario Brothers, you (the Monarch) move left and right with the arrow keys (or WASD), and the up and down keys are used for the only other two actions your Monarch can take: applying money to something, and doing a very brief attack that has a long cooldown. You can play this game with one hand. The ESC key brings up the menu with an island map– a hand-drawn blob with some grey shapes on it that essentially means nothing because you can only move left and right – and some UI actions like SAVE & QUIT. It's been ages since I've seen a game so stripped down, and I felt unsettled by the lack of instruction. Where's the 16-button controller and nonstop voice acting?

It's not here. You are on a horse, and you're standing in a forest, and half the screen is taken up by calm, rippling water, and the other half is sky. In the middle is you on a horse, and your face is just a couple of pixels, and a helpful ghost waving its hand.

Eventually, and randomly, you will encounter a dead campfire and some wandering people that look disheveled, and a closed treasure chest. Riding past the treasure chest makes it pop open and spit out gold coins with a beautiful "cling-ka-ting" noise that immediately dispenses dopamine along with the gold. Gold is automatically picked up by the Monarch and it drops into your new buddy, the money bag. Keeping an eye on money bag will be a good idea during this game, because it's not an abstract bag that holds gold forever. It holds a very finite amount of coins, and doesn't count them for you; it's full when it's full. You'll know it's full when it looks full and coins begin spilling out, falling behind you onto the ground ("ting! pling!"). This numberless, UI-less, totally visual indicator of resources is one of my favorite points of the game, along with the jagged pixelly edges of the coins and the bouncy-coin noises.

You quickly notice that developing things costs coins, and only coins. There is no resource gathering in this game other than currency. You're not stockpiling sticks or rabbit skins or iron ore. You go left and right, back and forth, and a little grey circle (or two, or three, or many more) appears over an item; a tree, a pile of dirt, a person; pressing the down arrow applies coins to those circles, and something begins to happen. A hammer appears in a rack, ready to be picked up; a ragged person becomes a citizen and runs off toward the campfire to pick up a weapon; the citizen with a hammer approaches the mound of dirt and builds a wall, which pops into existence around your camp. Ahhh, I see!

If you aren't paying attention, and are looking too closely at the absolutely stunning parallaxing water ripples and shimmers, sunset will begin to creep up on you.

The day/night cycles in Kingdom Two Crowns are so beautiful, with different weather effects, I spent several in-game days just watching the sun and moon rise and set. Fog, rain, clear skies, empty skies, burning blood-moons, dark shifting purple clouds, streaks of color all reflecting in the gorgeous water below, fading into deep inky blackness and the quiet intimidation of utter night.

There IS music in this game, but it's subtle and understated, and much of the game – especially at night – is quiet. Your horse can run with the Shift key, but not forever. It starts to snort heavily and will eventually refuse to go any further, and you must let it walk for quite a while to recover, or find a patch of grass so it can eat and refresh its stamina. This is all fine while you're close to your little base, with your little builders banging away at walls.

Exploring to the left and right, you'll stumble upon a variety of more-or-less unsettling shapes and objects. Actual amount of fear will probably depend on whether it's day or night. Deer are barely visible in the pitch black, except for their very faintly glowing eyes – then they bound away from you, a black shadow in the blackness. Beautiful crumbling ruins with mysterious markings loom up out of the forest, and little cabins with a single torch bravely fluttering in the night. Far in the distance are utterly unbelievable shapes: a colossus, a bridge in the sky, a giant stone hand, a series of gargantuan pagodas, as if they were dropped from a spaceship.

The design choice of making the playable character not only tiny, not only mostly centered in the screen, but ALSO limited to moving only left and right, leaves the environments as the main focus in Kingdom Two Crowns. A lot is going on around the Monarch, but they can only be where they are, and they can only see what's right here. Most of what's here is the sky and the water. Most of what's going on is picking up gold and putting it on trees, walls and people.

But only mostly.

If you are playing on any difficulty other than "Peaceful", and if you haven't played ANY base-defense game in your entire life, you may be taken by surprise when night brings something other than blackness and silence.

It brings The Greed.

If you haven't been building your walls up, The Greed will break them down. If you haven't been recruiting archers, they'll blast right through your wooden fences and wrench the crown from your head and run off with it– straight back into their pretty purple portal, faster than a horse can run, and you're done. "No crown, no king", states the game matter-of-factly, and it's Game Over.

Wtf! Your people apparently swear fealty to the crown, not the woman, and without the jewels of office you're outta there. This adds some tension to what seemed like a lovely relaxing vacation on a sunset island, doesn't it?

Part of the game cycle involves finding the wreck of a ship and rebuilding it, coin by coin. Your builders will run up to anything you've marked as For Building, and run off when they're done. Your farmers diligently farm a patch of land, generating tons of income that you can't physically carry, but only until winter comes (winter! Who allowed this??), when the rivers freeze over, the fields dry up, and only berries and game animals are around to generate gold for you. As much as you'd like to hunker down in your castle, you just can't.

Once the boat is rebuilt, you can take it and some of your villagers, and whatever's in your money bag, to the next island on your map (which tells you basically nothing about what to expect, except that it has... stuff on it). Unfortunately, because it's an uninhabited island (well, excepting the Greedlings running rampant), you crash right into it, and your ship is fucked. It'll have to be rebuilt... eventually. Again.

The Greed spawns not only from pretty purple portals but also from a big bastard of a cave at one end of the island. You are prevented from just wandering in there by the good sense of your horse, and your own refusal to walk on your own two feet. However, after building up your base and developing some heavy explosives you can enter the cave with squadrons of soldiers and the knights or generals that lead them, and do your best to blow up the Greed's nest. It is possible for the player to die in this attempt, or not have enough gold on hand to trigger the weapon, or get caught in the blast and fail to escape. These islands are dangerous (and The Greed are very, very fast).

But if you don't die in your attempt to clear out the Greed's nest, the island becomes a safe haven and you can repair your ship and move to the next, and the next. Keep applying gold coins (or the much more limited jewels) to oddities you find, and you'll unlock mounts, statues that seem to buff something, and resources like stone and metal mines that allow higher tiers of building.

Kingdom Two Crowns is actually a co-op multiplayer game (hence the name), which reduces stress and difficulty significantly, but I haven't had a chance to try this out yet. I can't say enough about the visual style in this game– the weather cycles, the atmosphere, the sense of dread, the steadily increasing tension of knowing The Greed is running at top speed toward your walls, your little pixel dog barking at something just offscreen, and you turning around to run back toward the safety of the stone barricades, praying your damn horse will have the stamina to get you all the way there, knowing you won't have time to let it stop and eat, the sun sinking below the horizon as you hold the arrow key down as hard as you can...

I have played over 20 hours in Kingdom Two Crowns and barely scratched the surface of the encounters, the Challenges and the difficulties this game can throw at you– but I have already been blown away by the precision and beauty in the pixel art, the music, the sound design and the entire vibe of the game. It feels almost like Japanese horror: creeping, psychological. Nature itself is fighting you, and you are a very small, very squishy human that shouldn't be here.

Hopefully you're riding a fire-breathing Baby Godzilla. Good luck, Your Majesty.

Personal rating: 9/10. The difficulty options ramp up significantly and many features, puzzles and secrets need to be looked up; not much in-game guidance for how to progress; but the beautiful art direction swept me away.

Kingdom Two Crowns is currently available on PC on Xbox Game Pass, Humble Bundle, and Steam; also available for Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PS5, and mobile.