The King Is Watching’s free demo turns city building into a brilliant balancing act of feudal surveillance

rockpapershotgun.com:

A watched pot never boils, so they say - ‘they’ presumably all being dead now after having their minds physically melted after hearing the first kettle click in readiness while stubbornly staring in the opposite direction. Yes, yes, it’s a metaphor, but we don’t have time for all that. Your kingdom is under attack by goblins, and the only way to get your useless underlings to chop the wood, till the fields, and train the guards needed to defend it is to provide constant surveillance. The King Is Watching is a minimalist resource-chain-em-up and wave defense goblin-knocker with a brilliant twist. I'm now a little bit obsessed with it, I think, and what is RPS if not a vehicle for chronicling my many fleeting obsessions?

Like many of these compact concept-driven strategy games do (Slipways, my beloved), The King Is Watching started as an Itch project. “Once you build something, it only works if it is inside your gaze,” is its unique thingamajig. Your ‘gaze’ starts as three squares on a 4x4 tileset, although you can upgrade it for wider gazitude. If a building falls outside your gaze, it doesn’t do anything. I love this concept so much, casting you as a jobsworth supervisor king constantly leering about his kingdom to scare the serfs into quitting munching on their straw sandwiches and get back to work. The gaze limitation makes you consider which sets of buildings you’re going to want active and complimenting each other at any one time.

So, training soldiers takes wheat, so it makes sense to have a defense-ready quadrant with a field and a barracks. Stick a wall-repairing structure in there too, while you're at it, alongside a mine for the clay you’ll need. Ah, but you’ll also want hardier troops for later waves. But! the training building costs gold, so you’ll want a marketplace to sell wheat…and you can already see how the gaze restriction turns a standard need-and-fulfillment pipeline into a more far more involved and puzzly affair. God save the king's neck as it