Almost halfway through
Queen's Wish: The Conqueror and it's such an interesting game I want to talk about it.
You play the third scion of Haven, spoiled heir to the most powerful nation in the world. It is the
queen's wish that you get off your duff and contribute to the royal interests. So she dumps you via magic portal on the continent of Sacramentum with orders to clean up an old embarrassment. Haven is the strongest nation not through exhibitions of power but careful negotiation. The favored tactic is to back one side of a local conflict, ensuring its victory it in the short term but entangling it through contracts and treaties into Haven's economy. What was once an independent people becomes a vassal state and then eventually is subsumed into the empire.
Several decades prior to the game Haven secured control of Sacramentum and was beginning to enjoy the fruits of its investment when a mysterious blight fell on the land. Crops and fields withered, livestock died, and the forces of Haven starved. The empire found it impossible to sustain a presence so they pulled out in favor of other interests, but always regretted the loss of the collony. This withdrawal left the three native nations of Sacramentum destabilized and at the mercy of bandits and local tyrants who rushed into the power vacuum.
This is the mess the queen hands you. To earn your place in the royal family you're to re-secure Haven's presence on Sacramentum and force the vassal states to honor their treaties, which are technically still in effect. And you do this through good ol' dungeon crawling and dialog trees!
I love the game's visual style. Look at this, it's perfect.
Marrying this premise to progression is one of Queen Wish's unique strengths. Dotted across Sacramentum are the old forts built during Haven's first occupation. If you can reclaim them they will produce resources used to purchase utilities and shops. This base-building component is at the heart of the game's mechanics. For example, level-ups don't increase stats. Gear is the primary way of making your characters strong. And while there is good loot out in the wilds, it's rare and won't sustain your party through the difficulty curve. But by investing in blacksmiths, weavers, and carpenters you unlock higher tiers of purchasable equipment that will keep your party kitted up. Additionally, these shops also provide passive advantages like bonuses to attack and defense or extra inventory slots. In general, any one shop will grant two benefits, which makes them desirable upgrades. However, in addition to the initial price they also cost an upkeep tax, so in order to afford more shops you have to find sources of passive income to sustain your forts' upkeep and this is where dungeons come in.
Just like shops, dungeons are multi-beneficial. Each one promises three rewards:
- Loot. Whether it contains gold, resources, gear, or single-use magic scrolls, each chest is valuable. There's no such thing as vender loot or potions for the stockpile. The economy in this game is tight and anything you can get for free is worth picking up.
- Experience. Monsters don't drop EXP in this game. The only way to get it is from dungeons. You get a little when you discover one's location and a lot when you finish a quest, of which every dungeon is tied to at least one.
- Passive resources. Once a dungeon is cleared it will start producing income to offset the cost of your forts or reduce the likelihood of theft from your current income.
This makes every dungeon valuable and important. You really feel like you're taking ownership of the land as you turn the untamed wilds into productive resources that directly influence your strength and capability.
The gameplay loop boils down to infiltrating a hostile region, establishing a base, outfitting to get strong enough to follow quests to local dungeons, clearing the dungeons to offset upkeep and afford new shops, outfit for quests in further dungeons, which will finance your excursion into the next region. Additionally, each region specializes in a specific resource but shops cost all three types, so you're encouraged to bounce from region to region rather than clearing one out in a single go.
This replicates the feeling of managing a kingdom. As you pay attention to stabilizing one region you feel the other two start to fall behind as the upkeep costs put a strain on their resources. The pacing is spot on; it always feels like there's something essential you need to do. You're torn back and forth as you crisscross the continent, juggling the complexity of upkeep as your conquest expands. Even though your time is spent down in the muck of tile-by-tile dungeon crawling it feels like you are sitting at top of the power structure with responsibilities appropriate to that position.
The unforgiving bogs of Ukat produce fine iron, the Vol desert stone quarries, and the mystical forest of Abriel precious quicksilver, the key catalyst in wonderous potions.
Now, all these systems are great fun to interact with but what makes the game
cool is how the narrative pushes against them. The gameplay pulls you into the roll of conquering hero, bringing order and stability to the wild barbarians. You literally get stronger by doing a colonialism. The narrative recognizes this and challenges the assumptions that fuel the game systems.
It feels good to get stronger, to clear dungeons and embiggen your enterprise. But doing so means trudging through the land mile by weary mile, encountering the locals and getting invested in their struggles. Each region is dealing with a fatal breakdown in structure that is destroying their nation. Ukat is at the mercy of violent tribalism, Abriel's ruling class has abandoned leadership to get drunk on psychodelic elixirs, and the Vol is torn by civil war. By law these lands belong to you and you bear some responsibility for their wellbeing. They're in such a rough state precisely because Haven's invasion and withdrawal destabilized the continent. Your character didn't create this situation but they're the person with the most means and legal justification to do something about it.
Yet each region's flaw is a product of their culture and to impose order is to deny their autonomy and right to self-govern. You've literally got to do the imperialist thing if you want to save these kingdoms. Queen's Wish sets up this contradiction elegantly: when you first arrive on Sacramentum you learn about the regions in broad terms with their cultures described via stereotypes and their conflicts presented such that intervention appears to be the moral choice. But as you move through the regions you come into contact with the cultures' complexity and nuance. Simple solutions no longer feel adequate or appropriate.
Jeff Vogel, the talent behind the game, said in an interview that his job as writer is to present a choice and then convince the player as hard as he can to take the other side. That struck me as telling. This maxim is effective not just because it makes for robust faction writing but because it reinforces the central conflict. There's no perfect solution. Go get the treaties ratified will require taking a side and compromising in some fashion. There is no heroic way to swoop in as the benevolent civilized nation and save the natives from themselves. To participate, no matter how well intentioned, is to be complicit in colonialism.
A good example of this is the Vol. When first introduced you're simply told they practice slavery and that the last time Haven was in control the Queen supported the slavers as it was the more profitable option. It seems like the moral conflict is going to be between siding with the rich but corrupt slave owners or the poor and persecuted slave revolutionaries: a simple renegade/paragon dichotomy.
It's a clear moral choice: slavery is abhorrent. But as you move into the Vol and start to encounter the nuance of their culture you begin to see how things aren't so straightforward. Vol society is divided into the average citizenry; a small ruling class of rich slave owners called Mascha; and the slaves themselves, a criminal class known as the Owen. Because the Vol desert is so unforgiving a collectivist society formed where communities pool resources to survive. Pride in contributing to the collective is at the heart of national identity and to fall into deep debt is the worst thing a person can do as this essentially means they've become an unfair drain on the contributions of others. Should this happen the debtor can choose between exile or becoming an Owen. This involves someone else paying the debt as an act of charity, thus negating the accrued burden on the collective resources, and in return the debtor devotes the rest of their life in servitude. Thus slavery is seen not as the ownership of one person by another but as a voluntary act of atonement.
Of course it doesn't work like that in practice. The Mascha are entrenched in power, more and more people fall into inescapable debt every year, and, the system at its most grotesque, if a person's debt is too great their unborn descendants are also marked as Owen. Despite being tied so tightly to the Vol's noble attributes of collectivism and self-sacrifice it is still an abominable system. And so, a sizable number of Owen have outright rebelled and entrenched themselves in an especially rugged part of the desert. Their rebellion has blossomed into an outright war for their freedom.
Still, the game provides counterarguments. One of your aids identifies The Vol as a "hard vassal." Hard, not because they're strong or difficult to control, but because there's an unsavory element in their culture that makes them difficult to absorb into the empire. Societies that engage in ritual human sacrifice or that sort of thing. When you ask how Haven traditionally handles these situations, she explains that by stabilizing the nation and increasing wealth through trade a corruption emerges that eats away at the nation's core values until such a point the taboo can be peacefully abolished. Essentially, you "civilize" them. The Vol is at a point where if Haven doesn't step in the war will tear the country to pieces. Siding with the Mascha is vile, but doing so will end the war as bloodlessly as possible and lay the foundation for a non-violent civil rights movement some undefined time in the future.
To take the alternate path is to side with literal criminals and engage in outright war. It's about the most invasive thing you can do: literal conquest of a weaker nation. But to not side with the Owen is to explicitly endorse slavery. Yet, to do so is doom the citizenry to violence and the complete upheaval of their way of life.
You can see how the game ping-pongs back and forth with justifications and counterarguments. Vogel is always trying to convince you of the other side. There's no clear easy path and no matter what you chose you're complicit in evil. And while I've gone on for paragraphs describing all this, the game handles it with a light touch. Unembellished, the game simply presents the perspectives of various NPCs, allowing you to draw conclusions and decide how you will roleplay your response.
A multipart quest with far reaching consequences tied to one faction nested inside another faction.
Another neat feature is that if you want to take the route of full non-interventionalist you can. Once you've amassed a token amount of quicksilver you can activate the magical portal home. Of course doing so is to doom Sacramentum to chaos and petty tyranny but there's any number of justifications for this choice too: honoring the autonomy of these nations to solve their own problems, a noble refusal to be a pawn in your mother's machinations. or even a selfish desire to return to a life of hedonism. Heck, you can even state an intention to start a revolution of your own and overtake the corrupt Haven empire. Additionally, upon beating the game you're given a code to carry over your choices and reputation to the sequel. You're completely free to blow a raspberry at the game and roll into the next adventure as a slacker kid or seething revolutionary if so inclined.
I like that the game presents all these choices and then honors your decisions. I especially like how the gameplay systems empower you while the narrative interrogates that power. I admire how game keeps you in a place of tension, offering no clear distinctions between good and bad, and critiquing the typical problem-solving player character found in CRPGs without resorting to making it into a mustache-twirling Sith Lord.
At least, I hope so. As I said, I'm only about 50% of the way through the game. I've essentially cleared out the first act of each region. I expect Vogel will continue to add richness and nuance to the scenarios in act 2, but who knows, it could be that outright-good solutions will be introduced that will give you a chance to come through the adventure mortally pristine. The game isn't trying to be like Tyranny, a serious and dour examination of the nature of evil. It wouldn't be entirely inappropriate for an heroic "out" to present itself at the 12th hour; but based on the set-up I don't think it's likely.
Whew! That was a lot of words just to describe the central conceit. I didn't even get to the game's unique approach to dungeons, character progression, and other ways it innovates CRPG design. But I'm boring everyone to tears so I'll wrap quickly by saying: game good, Spiderweb good.
