As always, when we’re talking about roguelike titles I can’t help but get a little excited. While I prefer action and shooting to be the chocolate to pair with creamy roguelike peanut butter goodness, I’ll admit that I’m game to try just about anything out. The King is Watching happens to be a strategy title, which would normally point towards deckbuilding, but thankfully it manages to have a style all its own.

Think of it as a pairing of city-building, some tower defense, and roguelike sensibilities, and you’ll begin to get the picture. You’ll start by simply laying down some buildings in your city grid, initially tied to resource collection of fundamentals like water, wood, and grain. Once you have a few of them set up you’ll get to know one of the game’s central hooks though, which ties directly to the title, and that’s the fact that your townsfolk will simply choose to sit idle unless you’re paying them direct attention. While early on you may have a grid with maybe 8 critical buildings that will provide you resources, defense, research, or whatever else, you’ll only be able to keep a limited number of those active at a time by fixing your gaze on them. As if that limited number was already enough of a challenge to manage though, your gaze also has a specific shape, meaning that in order to maximize your effectiveness you’ll need to think long and hard about where you place specific buildings and resources, ideally trying to position ones that are complimentary next to each other.

Of course, given this complexity there’s quite a lot to dig into, strategies to formulate, and plenty of trial and error experimentation in store for you… which some will likely love, and others will find to be a grind. As always, the fact that this is a roguelike means that you can expect to feel like the odds are typically stacked against you. Fail to get your town up and running with the right resources early on and you’ll likely pay for it, as once attackers begin to show up you’ll really need to be capable of mounting your defense. The challenge is that training different units requires the right buildings, resources, and critical time, so having a solid plan for where you place everything is vital to success, so you can be replenishing resources while also trying to mount up your brave defenders. Outside of the challenge, probably the most difficult obstacle here though is the console controls, which you can manage and get used to, but are cumbersome at best. With a mouse and keyboard the game’s interface would likely be easy to manage and follow, but needing to move between groups, switch between your D-pad and analog sticks, and struggle sometimes as you can’t tell what area you’re even trying to manage at the moment can be aggravating. For those willing to stick it out through those growing pains, there’s a pretty solid challenge to be had here, but until perhaps a Switch 2 version with mouse control arrives, if you have a PC this seems better suited to that platform.