Monarchy is a 2D side-scrolling strategy game, reminiscent of old school browser games from Kongregate, Newgrounds and many others. Developed and published by Brain Seal Ltd, it works well on Linux with the help of Proton.

When I started my first match, it brought me back to my childhood playing browser games. Thanks to their cute cartoon style art, side-scrolling movements and minimalist design. The mechanics of the game is very similar to the pixel art Kingdom by Noio, that you can play for free right now on Steam or the original from 2013 on their website if you have flash player enabled

You will build a base, hire help, protect your castle from nightly invasions and expand. Until you are strong enough to defeat whatever is the challenge of that scenario, like clearing a bandit camp or storming a castle, usually on one of the extremities of the map.

The map is long and comes with other buildings you can interact with: caves to explore, bandits hideouts to clear, mines, a windmill and a big tree that provides a special resource. You move around mounted on a horse that gets tired easily, followed by a single archer until very late in the game, when you unlock the constructions to build an army and that can take a couple of hours.

During those first hours, you will be building and protecting your base, as every night it will be stormed by the enemies around. You need to plan your daily exploration to make sure you do not have brigands between your base and you when the night falls, or you will not be returning home. The invaders become stronger every night.

Building and upgrading your main camp gives you tokens to build new structures surrounding it, like bow/hammer crafters, so you can convert peasants into archers or builders. There are also some buildings that need to be maned, like the farm and the catapult. You can find people to work for you in homeless shelters, houses or ask a cart to bring you some each day.

The tokens are single use, so be careful where you put them because you cannot move it later. Besides getting tokens by upgrading the base, you can buy some around the map, or find through exploration.

All the game economy is around the gold coins barrel mechanic. You will buy, build and rebuild things with gold coins. Your life points are how much coins you have, and you will lose one coin for every damage you take. You will spend coins to go inside caves or hideouts. You can pick coins from chests, defeating enemies, hunting, from your farms, send your works to mine, and many other ways. Not only that, but you also need to be careful with the quantity of coins you have, as the overflowing coins disappear, so it is better to just drop them on the ground. By exploring, you will eventually find an upgraded barrel that fits way more coins.

The minimalist design means there is not much in terms of user interface. If you walk, not run, in front of something interactive, it will do or show something, like opening a chest or getting coins from people - a little coin symbol will appear over their heads if they have any stored. Sometimes a big circle will appear on top, that is the number of coins you need to put in to trigger its effects.

The horse you ride will show signs of getting tired, and you can have an idea of the time of the day by looking at the position of the Sun in the sky. There are many of those indicative elements spread around the world.

I like minimalist designs, and I like exploring to learn, well, until you get to the point where it stops making sense, or it is inconsistent. For example, in most buildings you interact by putting in coins, if you recruit a new peasant from a house, you will need to put in the coins, but in the homeless shelter you have to drop the coins on the ground. Those inconsistencies and guessing work happen a lot, but once you learn what you will need to do, and what are the consequences, it becomes easier.

It does not help that the game has no option’s menu to check the controllers. I started the tutorial, the only way to learn about them, with keyboard and mouse, and tried to switch halfway to controller, all the minimalist instructions stayed for controller, and they were unintuitive, for example, left and right are A and D on keyboard, but W and S on the keyboard are X and A on the controller, and you also have the buttons to run and to change your construction token selection.

The construction menu also has a strange behaviour. You use the shoulder buttons to navigate the options, and hold A to confirm. But if you tap it, it goes to the next selection.

And the in option’s menu left and right are inverted from what you might be used. I was tapping left and the resolution was increasing, while right was decreasing.

You can walk left and right, run if you hold another button. You can drop a coin by tapping, or put in by holding, another mechanic not that clear due to the minimalist info. You can also place building tokens in open areas close to your base.

Because the game is not that clear in the beginning, you will have to take many attempts to understand what each thing does and progress a little further, losing resources and precious time as the hordes get stronger. You cannot do your objective of clearing the bandit camp until you fully upgrade your base, and a lot of exploration and trial & error will be necessary for you to understand the things you will need to get there. To make matters worse, there is no save. During the beginning, most of my game overs were due to my lack of understanding of the game, after it was because I had to do things in real life.

Lastly, the game offers split screen co-op. I did not have the opportunity to try it this, but I appreciate the addition as it would help a lot with the exploration of the long world.

If you miss old school browser games, like minimalist design and have at least 2 hours free in your schedule, Monarchy was released November 6 on Steam and you can get it now.

Steam Deck

So you may wonder how it fares on the Steam Deck.

The game works fine, besides the problems I listed with controlling. It consumes close to 9W with default options, and you can shave it down to 7.5W by changing the refresh rate on Steam to 30 FPS. If you don’t mind artifacts, you can go down to 7W by reducing the resolution by half(640x400).

I would not recommend to go so low with the resolution if it is your first time, as the GUI guides will become too small to understand.

Note: We were provided a game key by the developers