Reigns

Platform: PC
Price paid: £1.99

Reigns is a strange game. It's also a strange game to describe. It's not a difficult game to describe: it's a text-based dual-choice resource management game with roguelike elements putting the player in the role of a monarch. But that is strange. It's another one of those really inexpensive little indie games with Satan in it.

Steam is overrun with humorous, gimmicky indie games and most of them have some form of a devil. There's never much in the way of gameplay and there is always a moment that's designed to mess with your head and make your jaw drop. There is always a girl and there is always a lighthouse type shit. What sets Reigns apart is the fact that it is actually funny and challenging. As king, you must keep the kingdom's resources in the balance. These resources are the church, the people, the army and the treasury. Throughout the game you are faced with situations demanding you make one of two possible choices, either supplementing or depleting your supplies in varying degrees. The game is nice enough to let you know how big an impact your decision will make with a little circle above the concerned resource but you're left in the dark as to whether it will be going up or down. You might think it adds a degree of strategy. It doesn't. There are only about 50 different situations and you'll see them all within an hour. If variety is the spice of life, Reigns was cooked by white people. The challenge lies in the fact that you lose when any one of the resources is either completely empty or completely full. Reigns is probably the first game I've come across to punish me for doing too well. Narratively, they are all very different types of failure and you should definitely try to max out the people and the money resources.

Reigns is more suited to quick, short plays than to hour-long sessions. It is literally just text and weird, blocky portraits. And jokes. Haha. Admittedly, some of the humour is bang-on but a lot of it is just random stoner nonsense and I get the feeling the writer(s?) was trying to tick too many boxes. It's a very LOLRANDOM kind of game but has just enough charm and clever design to be endearing like a blind dog pissing on your feet rather than painful like a blind bloke shoving his walking stick up your read end. The player starts off completely blind (I was always going somewhere with this, even if you couldn't see it) and gains more and more insight into just what is going on until we meet the devil himself. Every 666 years. Haha. Now, I can't in all honesty tell you whether there is a point to it all because I stopped playing after meeting the devil for the second time and it being, for all I could tell, identical to our first meeting. Except that he told me the game would end after 1998 turns, or in the year 1998. That's probably a reference I don't get. Probably something to do with Windows 2000 and ME, the two OS following Windows 98, being an absolute pile of shit. But then again, it all plays like something made and especially written by an 18-year-old. So who knows?

Reigns is cheaper than a large bag of chips and infernally fun with friends and alcohol, maybe not so much on your Jack Jones. If you've got an evening free and some friends round, it's a two pound game that will probably offer you two hours of fun and with the state of Steam as it is, Reigns falls into the top 15% of games on the storefront in terms of overall quality.

Reigns is: going to the pub with Philosophy students/10