Queen's Wish: The Conqueror Review
DISCLAIMER: I received this game for free from the developer. I don’t think that fact affects my opinion of the game, but it would be irresponsible of me not to tell you.
In most open-world games, the player is a sort of untamed whirlwind of violence traveling across the land killing, looting and generally making a mess of the place. Strictly speaking, I knew this but I never really gave it much thought. But this week I took a look at Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror which asked “what if you built something after you were done being an untamed whirlwind of violence?”
In Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror, players are the third child of the queen of Haven, a far-reaching kingdom built on trade and economic power. After decades of luxuriating in wealth and disregarding the trials of life as only the fabulously wealthy can, the queen informs the player it’s time to make something of themselves. In order to strengthen Haven and themselves, the player must travel to the continent Sacramentum and rebuild the colony Haven established and subsequently lost. However, Sacramentum, like most places, already has inhabitants so players must decide how to deal with the various native peoples as they try to reclaim the remnants of their colony
The main thing about Queen’s Wish that caught my attention was its unusual blending of genres. At first it appears to be a turn-based open world RPG in the vein of Pillars of Eternity, but Queen’s Wish is also a strange breed of city builder game. This mix of genres absolutely makes sense since players have been sent to both remove threats to Haven as well as rebuild Haven’s colonies, but it feels like a level of pairing mechanics to story that I’ve never seen before. At the start of the game, Sacramentum has few inns or shops for the player to take advantage of. Instead, players are responsible for constructing these facilities themselves as well as providing the resources necessary for maintaining them by securing production areas such as mines or lumberyards. So, if a player wants to buy metal armor or weapons, they must first construct a smith. But having only one of any facility only gives access to the most basic services, which means players will need to build multiples of each. Fortunately, there are a handful of forts scattered across Sacramentum and, once constructed, they communicate with each other so players can build one smith in each of two forts and both will gain the benefit of having two smiths. I don’t know that everyone will like this system, but I personally love it because of how well it reinforces the story of the game. I will say, at first this comes off as a bit ethnocentric saying that the only way to get the advanced technology is by expanding Haven’s power in Sacramentum, but as I played more of the game I saw that the native peoples weren’t necessarily selling worse things, just different things that only they could produce due to different knowledge of resources and cultural needs.
Outside of the forts, Queen’s Wish transitions from city-builder to an RPG as players explore Sacramentum which can be roughly divided into two types of areas: the over-world and dungeons. In the over-world, players explore a zoomed-out Sacramentum in search of roaming enemies to defeat and dungeons to explore. When encountering the former, the game zooms in on the action long enough for combat and then returns to the zoomed-out over-world map. But in the case of dungeons, players are presented with a specific area to explore with its own features and enemies. Whether roaming enemies or dungeons, combat is the focus. Fighting in Queen’s Wish is very simple and, because of the game’s very limited graphical capabilities, sometimes not that interesting. Turn-based combat on a grid has never been the most enthralling even in high-budget games like XCOM, but since characters in Queen’s Wish have about four different animations fights that last longer than a few rounds feel like a grind. Thankfully, while the combat isn’t great, everything around it is good. Different categories of weapons provide interesting and meaningful trade-offs instead of slightly different damage ranges or chances for a critical hit. My favorite example of this is that characters equipped with daggers do less damage but in exchange get more turns in combat because they don’t have to worry about carrying a heavy weapon. Additionally, as characters level up they get points to spend on new combat abilities. Personally, I think characters get these points at too slow of a rate but the reason it’s not too much of a problem because characters can un-spend those points and redistribute them again at any time. I love how this allows for players to try out new ways to play without risking being set back or spending pricey resources.
As unique and defining as the mechanics and combat but far more subtle is Queen’s Wish’s way making player choice matter. Even though they are third in line for the throne of Haven, the player is of far higher social status than most people on Sacramentum, which means the people bring their problems to the player. Sometimes it’s a request to kill a group of enemies threatening the people, but sometimes it’s heavier matters like passing judgement on a criminal or establishing diplomatic arrangements. These choices change the game world but Queen’s Wish is incredibly coy about telling players what exactly the changes are. Choices that effect the other nations of Sacramentum will change the player’s standing with them but in order to find out what specifically changed, players must speak with local governors. Other choices will change things behind the scenes and players will never know something was changed, let alone how much was changed. This feels weird in a world where most games will tell players when they have failed to say the right thing or when rewards have been missed, and honestly it’s far more realistic. However, because the results of player’s action are so often obscured, it sometimes feels like nothing the player does has much of an impact. I’m not sure whether I like this system or not from a gameplay perspective, but it is incredibly well done from a world-building angle. My only real problem with the story of Queen’s Wish is that although the player has a choice of how to deal with the people of Sacramentum and how soon they would like to retire to their old life of luxury, I never saw any story option that involved giving the people of Sacramentum a choice in their own future. The game seems aware that colonialism isn’t great, but only gives you options to be a nice or mean colonizer. I would like to see choices that allowed me to declare Sacramentum an independent nation, gather the might of the native people behind myself and declare war on the kingdom of Haven. Even better, I would like an option to help mediate a truce between the three nations to form a unified Sacramentum and serve as an adviser, or even average citizen, of the new nation.
Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror is a game with a lot of very cool ideas but I’m worried that the game’s rudimentary graphics and the obscurity of some of the game’s main systems will make people think less of it than it deserves. I would worry about this possibility much less if I didn’t have such a high opinion of it, because Queen’s Wish is an impressive and well-made game. I hope people give it a chance and at $20 it’s easy for me to recommend.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
