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At night, your camp will likely be attacked by horrible demonic creatures, who, among other things, love stealing gold and that shiny thing on your head. As you go on, there is a night and day cycle.

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The darkening forest is full of ambling beggars in rags, crouched around campfires, waiting to be recruited to your cause, along with other far darker and deeper secrets. No two people playing the game will use the same strategies, and as the land you inhabit is, to an extent, generated slightly randomly, but with core features remaining, every play will offer a new experience and present new challenges and quirks.Īt its core, Kingdom: New Lands is a 2D sidescrolling roguelike where you you play as a King or Queen (random) that has come to rule a wild and mysterious land.

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The best part is that even when you do discover a major mechanic, such as how to build a certain type of defence, there is an infinite variety of ways in which it might be applied. I have played maybe 20 or so hours now, not including my first encounter, and I am still discovering new elements, new mysteries, new secrets. The joy of the game is that it doesn’t tell you anything (whilst apparently giving you a tutorial). There’s a problem with reviewing Kingdom: New Lands, and that is that the whole point of Kingdom is figuring out how to play it. This new version includes some tweaks to the essential gameplay, new mechanics, and even greater depth. Months later, I would get my hands on a copy of Kingdom: New Lands, a new version of the game built specifically for the Xbox Live marketplace. I would also discover that its mystery was legendary. I would discover it was its own kind of mini internet sensation, had a cult following and had even won numerous awards. I would later do a lot of research on Kingdom. I walked out of EGX, feeling like I’d had a real experience, the same kind of feeling you get coming out of a music concert. Eventually I stepped back and let someone else have a go. I heard whispers of people, thinking I was some kind of pro-YouTuber or speed-runner. I had survived 10 days, which apparently no one else at the expo had done.

Suddenly, there was attention on the game. After 20 minutes a crowd was watching me. I picked up the controller a second time, now with a kind of limited strategy in my mind. Because in watching the game, I’d been able to see what I couldn’t playing. After five minutes he put the controller down and walked off in a huff. The player was getting very frustrated, haplessly running left and right shedding coins like no tomorrow. I watched the pixel-art world, the people and creatures moving in it. To my surprise, someone else was playing it. I was sure, unlike the other people who had abandoned it, that it was not a fault of the game that was leading to my confusion, but a fault in my perception. Something about the game had entranced me. So, after I spent the rest of the day absorbing everything else EGX had to offer, including an exclusive 40-minute sneak peak of Dark Souls III, I decided I had to return and play Kingdom again. Its seeming simplicity which had somehow defeated my best attempts to “solve” it. After 30 minutes, I put the controller down and walked away, no wiser than when I’d picked it up.īut the whole rest of the day, Kingdom stayed with me. There were only two controls aside from directional movement: Press “A” to give a coin. After 20 minutes, I still had absolutely no idea what I was doing, how to play, what any of my actions in game were even achieving. Why is no one playing it? I quickly found out why. I remember thinking: This game is special.

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I was about to play what I would later find out was a straight port of the original PC version of Kingdom onto Xbox One. I picked up the controller and watched as the screen unveiled a landscape of hypnogogic pixellated wonder. That, in itself, was enough for the contrary person inside me, and I decided to give it a punt. Whilst many of the screens had queues of people, one was empty.

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Tucked away in a small corner was a series of panels with games by new or small developers such as Licorice and Raw Fury. I decided to investigate what else the room had to offer. Of the 40 or so screens, 20 were taken up with the already-released Quantum Break, and while I’ve got nothing against the game, I felt like the zealous focus on it showed a shortfall of new titles hitting Xbox. I then made my way up towards the Xbox room, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty disappointing. I’d spent a rather happy morning at the independent games expo on the bottom floor, chatted with some great developers, and seen some exciting new releases. My first experience of Kingdom was at EGX Rezzed 2016.