The clue, of course, is right there in the title. Developer Freshly Baked Games’ Queen’s Domain isn’t just a retro-fantasy action RPG played in first-person; it’s an explicit homage to King’s Field, the long-dormant FromSoftware series that – as the precursor to Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and all those other Soulslikes – helped shape the modern gaming landscape in its own small way. That, though, is pretty much where my knowledge of the series begins and ends – as much as I love FromSoftware, I’ve never actually played a King’s Field game. I’ve no idea how Queen’s Domain shapes up as Kings Field-like, then, but I do know that, five or so hours in, it’s already one of my favourite games this year.
Queen’s Domain begins, as many great games do, on a beach. Our hero, Prince Beriik, has been washed ashore after his expedition ship, on a voyage to the mysterious Isle of Neasied, is destroyed. Beriik is searching for his father, King Gius Abraon, who’s vanished on a mission to save the kingdom of Bamaen – after years of peace, the evil Queen Siraatsu’s army of the damned is stirring; the dead are rising, legendary beasts are returning, and the creatures of the land have turned feral. But for now, there’s simply a beach, the cry of distant gulls, and the gentle breaking of surf upon the shore. Queen’s Domain’s lore might read like an explosion in a vowel factory, but you certainly can’t fault its mood.
There’s something, perhaps, of the superb Dread Delusion in Queen’s Domain; specifically in the way both deploy the lo-fi video game aesthetics of 90s and early 2000s to create a more deliberate kind mood: those unnatural low-poly angles, those shimmering lo-res textures, and those rasterised skies creating – when viewed en masse across an expansive interconnected world – a particularly woozy sort of landscape. Here, though, the vibe isn’t so much putrescence as chilly isolation, the muted vistas awash in greens, greys, browns, and blues.
It’s a mood sent further off-kilter by the wonderfully odd soundtrack, whose seeping retro synths shift unpredictably from ambient melancholy to thumping dissonance, drawing in everything from parping trumpets to quacking ducks. And then there’s the geographic strangeness – the secretly labyrinthine shape of this deceptively compact island – that only grows more apparent the further you explore.
Once you pick yourself off the beach and wander inland, the path almost immediately forks: to the left a boarded trail, to the right a vast stone door. Up ahead a gated cave mouth, and looming high on the clifftop, a mysterious ancient tower. Queen’s Domain is full of these kinds of curiosity piquing landmarks, serving as both orientation points and unspoken goals.
Queen’s Domain isn’t exactly what you’d call forthcoming, you see, and early on – in lieu of a more explicit objective – that tower seems like a promising lead. Rusty blade in hand, you plot a likely course, but while there’s a sort of logic to the island from afar, the routes between its landmarks are woven in wonderfully convoluted ways. And before you know it, your path has spilled out onto the coast, winding a perilous cliffside route high above the crashing waves. A second option leads further inland, plunging downward into a shadowy glade. And it’s only after battling an onslaught of ladybird-rat hybrids and unnerving chicken-crickets (Queen’s Domain loves its weird wildlife amalgams) you realise the two routes converge.
From there, more branches, but always a tangled path; the island’s deliberately disorientating design turning navigation and exploration into a fascinating puzzle. And that only increases once you find your first proper sword. Imbued with a powerful darting slash, it’s both an offensive tool and – with a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency strafe – an occasionally defensive one. But, it also grants traversal powers, those darting thrusts carrying you across previously impassable gaps. Soon, exploration, initially restricted to ground level, grows increasingly vertiginous, opening up whole new possibilities. You’ll bound across treetops, charting a circuitous path around the island, or return to those shattered bridges and see what lies beyond. And that ‘what’ has frequently managed to surprise me – at one point, an apparently simple ascent turns into a several-hour trawl through a water temple.
Paths aren’t always obvious, either; you’ll plunge into a pool of deadly miasma, shuttling forward at the last moment to propel yourself along a carefully concealed pipe, or investigate a previously unreachable overhang only to unearth a secret passageway leading to horrifying depths. And often, you’ll stumble across sudden shortcuts, causing routes to unexpectedly fold back on themselves. Truthfully, the freedom is mostly an illusion – the island is carefully designed to prevent you from deviating too far – but the proliferation of secret corners, and the minimal handholding, means the paths you’re forging feel like your own. And as you unlock new tools, you realise there’s a Metroidvania aspect to these spaces too. It’s clever stuff, particularly when more overt puzzles are introduced, feeding further into the traversal rhythms.
And throughout it all, combat serves as Queen’s Domain’s drumbeat, punctuating progress with encounters whose wilfully rudimentary systems do, admittedly, take a bit of getting used to. It’s not just the deliberate wooliness of it all as Freshly Baked emulates the combat of video games yore, or enemies’ merciless in-your-face lock-on once disturbed, it’s the limited ways you can respond. You can swing your sword, step outside of an incoming attack (there’s nothing so advanced as a dedicated dodge button), and, well, that’s pretty much it. And even accounting for enemies’ minimal, largely predictable attack patterns, you’ll invariably fumble and die.
But slowly it evolves into something compelling; a methodical game of feints and opportunistic returns, of goading enemies into attacks so you can, as far as your stamina gauge allows, exploit the resulting window. It’s still far baggier than, say, Dark Souls, but it finds an engaging rhythm. Partly that’s down to a combat twist that actively encourages restraint: standard weapon swings barely do more than chip damage, but hold the button to charge up your attack, and you’ll do substantially more harm. That turns combat into a dance of patient timing, as you try and find the perfect moment to unleash a swing as multiple enemies move in.
That’s just the foundation though. Soon enough, you’ve got throwing knives (which slowly replenish over time) for kiting, supplementary damage, or picking off sentry-like foes at a distance. There are spears and bludgeons, often with unusual secondary abilities, and it all feeds into a rock-paper-scissors-style damage system that encourages experimentation with your arsenal – especially where bosses are concerned. And the final flourish is an automatic levelling system that doesn’t just strengthen your character as you play, it levels individual weapons – eventually causing them to evolve. It encourages engagement with enemies rather than avoidance, and provides a regular sense of progress in a game where the sometimes unforgiving challenge means inevitable repetition.
Queen’s Domain is not, I should stress, a Soulslike, despite some similarities. You don’t drop stuff on death, meaning no desperate corpse runs, and while resting and replenishing your energy at crystals resets the world – encouraging some push-your-luck risk-taking – you can save your game independently, creating some welcome breathing room.
Put all this together and Queen’s Domain is a wonderful surprise; a moody, someties silly retro throwback that, despite its self-imposed mechanical and aesthetic limitations, feels anything but limited. Five hours or so into its supposedly 40 hours of playtime, its mix of combat, exploration, and puzzling has settled into a properly compelling rhythm – and despite some tricky bits and my own cack-handed frustrations, it keeps pulling me back in again. I’ve no idea if Queen’s Domain is a good King’s Field homage, but so far at least, it’s a bloody good time.
