Review of the Queen’s Estate | RPG website

Usually games don’t wear their inspirations on their sleeve as clearly as Queen’s Domain. The name says it all; Freshly Baked Games really likes King’s Field and wanted to put their own take on the idea – as has become a bit of a trend in recent years.

You are a prince, and after trying to follow your father the king on his quest to defeat the resurrected evil queen who is also the deadly avatar of a void god, you become shipwrecked and forced to pick up the pieces of an expedition gone horribly wrong and succeed where the king and his knights failed.

The fight is simple; you have a stamina meter and you can run indefinitely; However, your primary and secondary attacks decrease your current stamina, so you can’t just run around forever shooting enemies. You have to choose wisely when to stop and let it replenish before rushing in to strike an enemy. Different enemies have weaknesses to different types of attacks – slashing, slashing, and piercing – so it’s best to use the right weapon for the job.

You can equip up to 3 secondary weapons – daggers, chakrams or other throwables – and 3 primary weapons. Secondaries do not use stamina, but will recharge over time. Regardless of what you have equipped, very soon after starting the adventure you will have access to a sword equipped with “Wind Gems”, which is the main determining factor for much of Queen’s Domain’s level design.

While the combat is very deliberate, as you would expect from the genre, platforming is the name of the game here and is aided by the ability to dash across gaps, reach distant ledges, or search for secrets midway through pits, etc. At first, players will only have access to one Wind Gem and one Airdash at a time; but as you progress through the game, you will have access to more gems, giving you multiple airdashes and, thus, more options of locations to explore.

It’s an inspired mechanic, and once it determines how accessible the world is truly to you, the world of Queen’s Domain ends up unlike any other RPG I’ve played. Secrets are hidden everywhere; hidden walls with the only clues being the skeletons of other people using their last moments to give a clue to their existence, or others where the lenses you can discover on the game’s many gods help you search for them. Do you see a ledge? Chances are, if you can achieve it, there’s something worth it.

Weapons are a good example; use them enough and they will level up, increasing their stats. Rusty weapons will evolve into a unique weapon after you have worked on them enough; others might undergo an entirely different transformation. A Trident I received early on had an interesting description, and after enough use my suspicions were confirmed. Even though the combat system itself is simple, there is an insane level of expression for players available among the dozens of weapons to find across the world or purchase from the game’s trading outpost.

If all you want to do is reach the first ending of the game, you’ll experience an adventure lasting around 20 hours; pretty simple, but still requiring players to be curious about how they do it. Yet if you’re willing to seek out the game’s additional endings, you slowly realize how much scope the game hides, and how many areas you thought you’d explored in depth still have yet to be discovered.

This is generally a good thing, although I think as the end of the game approaches it becomes a bit excessive; something that Freshly Baked Games themselves were okay with, given some of the concessions they make as they approach the home stretch. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of how some collectibles needed for the true ending that I almost certainly never would have found otherwise. With the way the game has been giving you clues so far, this especially stings.

That being said, I’d wager that most players won’t have as much trouble finding the secrets as I did; now that the game is out, it seems clear that Queen’s Domain is as much a community affair as it is solo exploration. Even when I started to get tired of running through areas again, the game’s visual identity remained striking enough that I never really got tired of it. While Queen’s Domain doesn’t really feel like an original PlayStation game – with the visual fidelity and view distance on display, I doubt it would even run smoothly on a PlayStation 3 or 4 – it evokes that feeling while maintaining an identity of its own.

Queen’s Domain is something special, and of all the King’s Field-inspired RPGs in recent memory, it clearly stands out as the best in its class. If you’re willing to play by its rules, Queen’s Domain is not only one of the best RPGs of the year, but a true must-play.

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