The King is Watching is exactly about that: you play the King, and your people are only doing actual work when you are watching them! There’s more background and lore, but that’s the key concept at the core of this new indie game.

Waves of enemies

So this is yet another roguelite game, where you’ll need to die several times to get enough experience and pass the first few levels. And by enough experience, I don’t mean getting actually good at it (while this is a factor), but gaining enough XP to unlock various bonuses that will help you beat levels. This has become almost a common trope in too many games, so this is not original per se.

Here what’s different this time.

You start with a grid of 4 by 4 squares in the upper left corner of your screen, that represents the inside of your castle. At the beginning, there is nothing in there, and you start building a well to get water. After you get some more water, you can build a forest, and a wheat field, to get food and wood. A few moments later, you will be able to build your peasant’s house, giving you two weak peasants to fight for the safety of your castle. They will hang on the outskirts of the wall, waiting for the enemies to come from the right side of the screen.

Enemies come on a regular basis; you know when you expect them thanks to a banner indicator at the very top of the screen, showing when the next wave will hit your castle. Of course, things start small, with a few goblins or a few beasts, but the longer you wait, the stronger the waves become. And eventually, once in a while, a boss will appear - a much stronger opponent that will require all your might to destroy.

You do have some kind of say in the coming waves. There is an oracle who asks you to choose your fate, where you can decide in which order the coming waves will come. Some waves are mandatory, and some optional. At least you get to decide the order, and if you feel brave enough, you can add extra enemies to secure more bonuses!

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? At the very beginning, as I was explaining, you start with almost nothing. And you only possess a very narrow gaze, with three blocks (think of a triangle shape) that you can “look at” at the same time. Just like with Tetris, you can turn the shape of your gaze in different directions, or move it around to cover different tiles. But that’s the key: the main control you have on your people is where you decide to look, as it activates their productive behavior.

So your gaze is limited in scope. But you have another tool that you can use: where to place the tiles. You decide where the new tiles (be it food, wood, ore, wheat production, or buildings) should be, and their positioning is very tactical. The closer you put the tiles that work well together, the less back and forth and juggling you have to do to keep things going.

To give you an example, if you put barracks next to a wheat field and wood, you can ensure a constant production of soldiers - they require wheat and wood to be spawned. Another example would be to build a market just next to a wheat field, with the market selling wheat (you can decide what to sell) in exchange for gold.

So you might wonder, how do you unlock new resources and buildings?

Waves of bonuses

As you may have guessed, every wave of enemies defeated comes with some rewards. Sometimes it’s just denarii (money) that will be used to purchase additional items with a trader that appears now and then.

Sometimes, you are provided with new buildings or new production tiles to choose from. Or new spells! Spells are magical artifacts that the King (you!) can use in the fighting zone to either help your troops or weaken the enemies. You can create a gap in the group, send meteorite, summon demons, or provide self-healing on a given zone where your fighters are.

It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. The more you win, the more you unlock, and the more powerful you become. But every choice you make, when you pick up a bonus, matters. Should you pick up a production tile that will boost your wood or wheat production, or go for an archery house that will produce archers? At the end of the day, every decision is a trade-off, but there are good and bad trade-offs to make at different parts of the game.

At the beginning, you are VERY resource-constrained, so any money spent or any new tile given to increase the speed of any of your productions is a gift. Once you have the production figured out, turning the base items (wood, wheat, ore, water) into more valuable things is easy. Starting with resource-hungry buildings will make everything slow down and impede your progress.

It’s an arms race anyway. You have a few waves of enemies to figure the dynamics of your resources out, and then you really have to step up your military might: barracks, archers, madhouse, healers, wizards, and so on, will be necessary to repel the stronger enemies.

I forgot to mention that you can also upgrade two very important parameters:

• the area of your gaze (from 3 blocks to 6 blocks, through several steps, and huge amount of resources needed to unlock each of them)
• the number of fighters you can have outside of your castle. Starting from 2, to about 18 or so a few upgrades down the road.

Running out of space

The main problem, and that’s a big one, is that you only have a 4x4 set of tiles to work with, for a long time. This means that you will eventually run out of space to build new things, and that you need to destroy previous structure or production tiles to replace them with newer ones. This becomes yet another thing to manage, as if your life was not complicated enough already!

Production tiles will see their resources exhaust at some point too. You can see it with a counter on each of them, going down as you exploit them. Once it reaches zero, poof! the tile is gone. This is then a good time to replace it with something better. For example, replacing a forest by a saw mill that will produce a lot more wood. You get the idea.

There are also other tiles at the border of the castle. The nobles’ houses. They take space, and you sometimes wonder if you could not do anything about them, to actually use them. Turns out that you can, but after unlocking a bunch of things in the progress tree. You see, after each level (whether you won or, more likely, were defeated) you get to buy a bunch of improvements:

• new assistants, who will give you some bonuses
• a progress tree, with 4 different “eyes”, where you can unlock new skills or bonuses one by one, following each tree branch.

That’s inside such skill trees that you will eventually find the ones to remove the nobles houses to increase your production space.

The King is Happy

Overall, this is an excellent game. It will give you this just one more round itch to keep you going over and over again. The rules are very simple to start with, and the new elements are added very progressively, making it a breeze to grasp and learn. The complexity is reduced by a very good and clear UI - making things very intuitive for the most part, while it demands you to pay attention to many things. The amount of options and tweaks is a huge space to explore - so there is bound to be some ways that work much better than others, to beat even the stronger levels.

And tweaks, bonuses, you will need! Some bosses have like 10000 HP, and there is no way you can kill them with regular foot soldiers and archers: they will come and destroy the walls of your castle. So, unlocking more boosts, assistants and additional buildings will go a long way to defeat those.

You can even change your King, and take a different one with other traits and personalities. One of the later kings that you can unlock, Leonid, boost the HP of your units, has unlimited gaze area, and features unlimited wrath as well. Depending on the type of challenge you are facing, some kings will be more fitting than others.

Levels take a fairly long time to beat, and each newer level comes with newer challenges, new bosses and more. You can complete a level once you reach the desired Threat Level (meaning a large number of waves and enemies of increasing strength). In other words, this is a game that will eat a lot of your time to beat. But you should expect that from a roguelite title.

Steam Deck

This is a game that is light on resources so it will work very well on the Steam Deck, at 60FPS. The only problem is that the text is a little too small, and is sometimes hard to read on the Deck. Which results in a playable rating - honestly deserved. Not sure if the developers plan to do anything to improve things for the Deck down the road or not, but do pay attention about this if you intend to play it mostly on your Deck.

That’s it. Another great concept and great title released in 2025, and there’s still more to come! It’s available on Steam right now. It goes right into our recommended games list.

Note: we have received a key from the publisher for this review, while this has no bearing on our judgment.