Reigns: Her Majesty

This game is pretty unassuming, but I think the simplicity of the gameplay works in favor for the overall game. With smart humour and surprisingly meta writing, Reigns: Her Majesty exceeded all expectations I had of this game I bought on a whim. I expected something cute and short, but I got a satirical game with a surprisingly deep political system.

The game operates much like a typical Tinder app (swipe left or right for positive or negative reactions). It expands upon this by adding a political edge to it, such that your answers have consequences on the four pillars of your kingdom (Church, People, Military, and Wealth). Surprisingly, this simple system was able to weave politics into its scenarios well, especially since as a ruler and leader, your decisions will have consequences. Eventually, if those consequences rack up, then you go out just like if you were in Game of Thrones - usually, that means death. It's actually pretty hard to stay alive in this game until much later, and my first few runs as queen ended quite unfortunately under the boots of my citizens due to their love for me, or because I drowned in a lake since my carriage of pure gold broke. Fun times in queendom!

The routes you can take with the stories are quite fun and varied, and there is a large cast of characters and advisers that it's entertaining to read their responses. The humorous dialogue helps, as the writing for the scenarios are witty and take narrative turns that are unexpected as you make your decisions. But as I said earlier, it's pretty hard to make the right decisions in a balanced way. The game is indeed a strategy game, where you must consider each decision you make; furthermore, the items you get must be used in a specific way to unlock the endings, but to figure out how, and the order, must be figured out from the small clues left to you by certain character dialogues.

The only con I can describe about this game is that after a while of playing, you do eventually see the same scenarios and cards, and this can get very repetitive and boring. This is hampered by the fact that to achieve other endings, you have to reset the game and redo all the steps, which I find is incredibly tedious, though once you know how specific dialogue branches work you can navigate those without much problem as you figure out the order of events to get the next ending.

---Originally, the paragraph here contained spoilers. For the sake of not spoilering things (as in my original Steam review) I will say this in place of the originally spoilered paragraph: This game is extremely meta. You're expected to fail to advance. There's a lot more beneath the surface of what this game, as a package, is presenting, and I find that utterly fascinating.---

Art and music are quite nice, and have a distinct style for the game, however there is nothing else to really describe as they are both so minimalist. This game relies heavily on its writing to carry the game, as well as its political system, so the minimalism serves to highlight these.

Overall, I recommend this game, especially since it's already cheap to begin with. I think it offers a rather interesting story in more ways than one, and may take you by surprise in the same way it did to me.

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Read more reviews at my Steam Curator Page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/30187278/