Did I get this game in a Humble Bundle or did I buy it off Steam? I do not remember. But I do know that the interesting simplicity of the gameplay roped me in and proceeded to choke me. After logging over 9 hours of gameplay with no final victory I gave the game a rest. I tried playing it again months later and this last-ditch attempt just confirmed what I knew deep down. I was never going to finish Reigns.
I believe I first heard about this game from a Kotaku article or something and the gameplay intrigued me. You have to choose between two options while also making sure four different stats don’t reach their min/max. The four stats are the church, the people, the army, and money. Some decisions can raise multiple values at once, others can lower them all. It’s a balancing act that gets repetitive after you see the same card over and over again.
Before I can really talk about the problems the core game loop I must tell you about the victory conditions. I haven’t played this game in 3+ years so I might be off a bit. The devil comes to you and curses you or something and so you have to do some magic or something in specific years in order to kill him. I think. I never did it because in my quest to find the card that would unlock a new world of game progress I got bored to near death.
Whenever your current king’s reign ends(they don’t always die) you unlock an ending card and they add his years on the throne to the timeline. It’s cool to see all the different rulers stacked up against each other. The game also keeps track of the various characters cards you unlock, so when you have one that you just can’t obtain you can go look at its future spot. A spot that will go unfilled cause you’ll have quit the game.
But why did I stop playing? Allow me to breakdown the gameplay even further. A bunch of cards will have you pick one thing then you move on. Some have you pick 2-4 options in a row before proceeding. Others are basically their own little Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and have at least 7 options that you’ll inevitably mess up on, then you basically have to kill yourself, then on your next run you dill-dally until that card comes back up then you try it again! And I hope you didn’t forget what you did that first time! Oh you did?
Some of you might be questioning my anger at a game with such simple gameplay. You might be thinking that this is akin to a casual game like Candy Crush or something. This game requires you to remember enough things that a long hiatus would stifle you. You can’t think on your feet with this game, because anything can happen, and it usually isn’t good.
