Before Dark Souls there was King's Field, and five hours into brilliant homage Queen's Domain, it's already one of my favourite games this year
By Google News Technology ·
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 the 90s and early 2000s to invoke 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…
Originally published by Google News Technology
