Kingdom Come: Deliverance

An utterly engrossing adventure that demands much of the player—perhaps too much—but will reward dedication and patience in spades.

As a complex game, it deserves a complex review.

There is much to love about it. It looks great and is packed with historical detail, excellent writing, and terrific quests. The dedication to authenticity is all-encompassing. The story, the locations, the characters, and even the game systems all combine to make this a wonderfully immersive simulation of life in Bohemia in the Middle Ages. People go about their daily routines in ways that feel organic. They break to eat or rest, gossip with each other, all in accordance with their character and lot in life.

When applied to the game systems, however, this commitment can prove divisive. There is the common survival-game-type upkeep: You must eat—but not overeat—wash yourself and your clothes, mend your weapons and armor, and healing is not automatic. That's all familiar and doable, but combat is a different ballgame. Not only does your character have to slowly advance in skills, but so do you, the player. You have to learn the controls, the moves, and pay very close attention to your opponents. You start off weak and squishy, and never really become video-game powerful. Even small skirmishes can easily end poorly. Your weapons and armor matter a lot, too. Many players have reported getting frustrated by the combat mechanics and abandoning the game, so be warned of this aspect, and note that there are mods that might make it more palatable to your tastes.

Also note that you don't have to do much combat if you don't want to. Like all RPGs, you can play your own way. For example, you can talk your way out of many dicey situations. Or use subterfuge. On that note, thievery is a big part of the game. It's definitely possible to honorably avoid it, but you will miss out on a lot of content, and it's also not easy to survive in this world without a bit of it. Being poor is very hard indeed, but it can also lead to not having fun with the game. So, sure, you can play your own way, but there are consequences, and not all paths would be equally satisfying. And there's the usual RGP filler, too. The core quests are magnificent, but there are far too many hunting quests that are identical, boring, and serve as unnecessary padding for a game that is big and dense enough.

This leads me to a more serious issue with the game. Opinionated design decisions of course come with tradeoffs, and unfortunately I did not love them all. Specifically: the omnipresence of failure. On the one hand, the game wants you to feel anxious, fearful, and small. So many things can go wrong in so many ways. And, to be clear, it's viscerally immersive and is a crucial part of making the world feel real and authentic. That's good; very good. But this relentlessness often comes with too great a cost.

First, there is the save system. The game auto-saves in specific quest markers, when you sleep (which you can only do in specific locations), and when you use a special, expensive potion. The bottom line is that you cannot save whenever you want. This is meant to encourage you to accept and deal with failed outcomes and bad decisions, and to the game's credit, failure might come with dedicated content that can be just as fun as the "success" path. Alas, this is not always the case. Too often failure will mean that you miss out, indeed much of the game's best content requires "success", and the choices leading to it are often far from obvious.

Even worse, quests are extremely fragile, by design and due to the many, many bugs. The worst aspect is that many quests are timed, and of these many don't tell you how much time you have. That notification you get that a quest failed because the clock ran out is very demoralizing. Woosh, it's gone. There's basically nothing you can do other than load an old save, rewinding so much of your progress. I had one very dispiriting situation where I started two quests at the same time (they're at the same location), not knowing that they were both time-sensitive and indeed ended simultaneously. Both were really great quests and I did not want to fail either of them, so my options were all bad. I decided to load an old save and had to repeat a lot of stuff. It plain sucked. For me, the game's insistence on constant and arbitrary failure is exhausting.

There are two workarounds, but they both come at the cost of immersion. First, I strongly recommend installing the "Unlimited Saving" mod. Whether or not you will abuse it by "save scumming" is up to you. Second, when a quest is available to you, look it up online. Alas, you will get spoilers, but you will also know what to do to avoid failure, especially time-sensitive failure. It can save you from a lot of heartbreak.

Bugs! So many! Buggy quests, loading screens that never finish, getting stuck in scenery—the usual for RPGs. Kingdom Come competes well with Bethesda in this exasperating respect.

A final complaint is about controls and traversal. Ugh. The dog companion is adorable and fun... until it decides to sit at door thresholds and won't budge. Characters constantly get in your way. And riding horses: I have yet to find an RPG that does this well, but in Kingdom Come it can be especially frustrating. Little things in the terrain block your movement entirely. There was one stealth mission where are all of these flaws came together to make me rage quit for a bit. I don't want to see another bush again in my life! In any video game!

Or... I could have just accepted my bungling and failed the mission. I looked it up online, and things would have worked out, somehow, anyway. Which leads me to the bottom line: It sometimes feels like Kingdom Come hates you. Yes, you, specifically you, but it's all in service of immersion, putting you in the protagonist's shoes. You're a commoner in a world that blatantly discriminates against you, and indeed uses religion to justify it. C'est la vie in Europe, 1403.

Back to where I started this review. If you're patient and appreciative of harsh realism, there is a chance that Kingdom Come would be your favorite RPG ever. But there is also a chance you'll drop off after a few hours of frustrating gameplay. In which case: May Mary Mother of God have mercy on your soul. Amen.