The King is Watching roguelike kingdom management simulation presents players with fascinating situations, but sadly doesn’t feel suited to the Switch. This is for sure one of those games that not only is good, but might even be great if RNG favors you and a run goes well! I bet it’d be a must-play on a PC. But the UI and fundamental mechanics essentially require a mouse. The fundamentals behind a The King is Watching run are fairly simple. You are presented with an area and a grid filled with tiles on the left side of the screen, with a road leading to your domain on the right side. Said tiles may have symbols on them that can do things like speed up production or strengthen the units that are created from the barracks placed there. You know waves of enemies and bosses are coming, with a timeline at the top of the screen going over the weeks and letting you know when danger is about to strike. After choosing a starter pack, which determines your initial buildings and fighter units, getting initial spells, and selecting an artifact that could do something like give you a second chance if it looks like you’re about to fail or more wood, it’s off to work. Each type of building and tile requires certain recourses to place, and they will produce some sort of needed material or unit. The catch is that they will only “work” if the King’s Gaze is upon it. This starts out as a three-square, L-shaped region, but you can invest resources to upgrade both the scope of that and the number of available army units on the road to protect the health of your kingdom. Since the fighters you’ve been able to place automatically handle enemies, the gameplay largely involves choosing where your King’s Gaze falls to ensure production on certain tiles to get materials to invest in new tiles, larger gaze, and more units so you can be prepared for more onslaughts. After surviving each enemy attack, a number of rewards are doled out as you get to “choose your fate.” These consist of inevitable ones that guarantee certain enemies and rewards and optional ones that add additional opponents and things like more spells or troop training. You’ll also get to do things like choose a new building with a new kind of unit (which may or may not combo with existing ones to help you form a strategy), and get to pick other rewards like additional buildings and spells. Go Ad-Free With Siliconera+View the site with no ads, be able to provide direct feedback about what we cover, and be automatically entered into our monthly PC game giveaway.Join Siliconera+ All of this works well together in The King is Watching and requires you to think about King’s Gaze investments, which troop types you select, and how to arrange tiles to ensure you’re able to produce the amounts of materials you need efficiently. Naturally, since this is a roguelike RTS and kingdom management sim, it means luck may or may not be with you! Experimentation is encouraged to find strategies that work for you and troop combos that work well, such as pairing ranged Crossbowman units with a melee Warrior ones to grant the warriors more health due to the cover fire. It also means gauging how risky you’re feeling when selecting the prophecy. So if you aren’t a fan of not really being guaranteed some good allotments, that could hamper your enjoyment. But if you do like kingdom and resource management, I feel it features a really solid feedback and gameplay loop. Images via Hypnohead The real issue with The King is Watching is it doesn’t feel at home on the Switch due to the way the UI works and how you’re supposed to dictate your moves. It feels like the optimal play involves constantly being prepared to shift around the King’s Gaze over the kingdom to actively manage production and check in on requirements. The controller control scheme isn’t optimal for that! Part of it is because the cursor is shockingly small on the Switch. But it is also because using the triggers to tab through everything and get the data or perform the actions needed to successfully manage the kingdom feels fiddly and inefficient. It doesn’t flow together well. While I could play and do pretty okay, it wasn’t comfortable. This isn’t the fault of the UI in any way. When you do get the windows open and are where you need to be, all the information is displayed well and quite clear. (Quite small in Handheld mode, but still possible to parse.) It just begs for the mouse. The concept behind The King is Watching encourages constant engagement, but it doesn’t feel well suited to the Switch due to its nature. This is very much a game where a mouse-based control scheme is needed due to how often you will be adjusting the King’s Gaze, selecting specific items to place or spells to use, checking details, and performing upgrades. And because of all that and the tiny size of things like the cursor and some presented information, it can be a little uncomfy playing in Handheld mode. It is a solid game, but I think the Switch isn’t the best way to play it. The King is Watching is on the Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC.