The Kindly King

The Kindly King is the tale of a young man, who one day woke up in his bed and decided to help people. It really is that simple. First, he starts by helping people in his village by doing their chores and vanquishing a slime. After doing these menial tasks, he decides to leave his village, there might be other people in the world that need help. As a reward for helping everyone with their daily chores, he is given the ownership of a nearby abandoned castle by the village elder. A truly great deal for helping someone chop firewood.

And... that's it for the "storyline". Well, not exactly, let me explain. Our protagonist wants to help people and no task is too small or insignificant for him. Thus, the entire game is a sort of a light "puzzle game". You wander on the world map, visiting different towns. In each town, there are a few people that need help with something, usually very small scale tasks like "I need a new cloak, go bring me one!". Completing these "quests" gives you standard RPG quest rewards, but also increases your reputation with that particular town. If your reputation with a town reaches 100 (which only happens once you complete all the quests there), they send a representative to your castle.

Presumably, the goal of the game is to complete all the quests, max out all the available reputations and get all the representatives in your castle. The game doesn't seem to have an ending though and there's no special event after you manage 100% completion, which makes this feel a bit hollow. In fact, there's a lot of things in the game that feel hollow, especially the crafting system, which is mostly useless, since everything you need can be bought very cheaply. Upgrading your castle is nice, you can build shops and farms there and then you need to find NPCs in the world that will move into these buildings and make them functional.

Now, how does this work as an RPG? Well, this is where it falls apart. For one, you have no skills. All combat encounters are won by spamming attack and using a healing potion when needed. There is also a very limited amount of enemies. The world map encounters consist purely of different colors of slimes, the two "dungeons" draw from two different troops. One consists of 3 Rats, the other consists of 6 Bats. Both are supremely annoying and in addition to that, the rats are also very strong, with an annoyingly high evade rate. The dungeons that feature them also have a ridiculously high encounter rate (unlike the relatively reasonable encounter rate on the world map), meaning that you will mostly just keep escaping from combat every few steps. That's not even mentioning the fact that the sewer dungeon has both these random encounters and rock pushing puzzles, something that's seldom good when combined together.

You start off with your lone hero, but eventually, you will recruit 3 other companions, who join you either out of gratitude or because they have nothing else to do. They have no skills either, but getting even one of them makes the combat much easier. Aside from slimes, rats and bats, it has only two combat encounters. One is a fight against two bandits you need to win to recruit one of the party members, the other is some sort of "final boss"? Well, there's a quest in one of the towns where you need to defeat a Water Goddes that threatens to destroy it. You can attempt to do so at any time after you reach the town, but the boss is so strong that it will take you your full party at a decent level and a lot of healing potions if you want to defeat the boss. And even then, due to the fact that your party has no skills, you need some amount of luck with criticals and hit chance.

Now, what more can I say about this game? It's at its best when you are collecting different NPCs for you castle, building up the place and overall just exploring. It's when it also tries to be an RPG that the cracks start to show, mostly because that part is clearly unfinished. That's a shame, as despite the game's flaws, there is enjoyment to be had.