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Nestled in a leafy woodland about two hours south of Paris is an experimental archaeology project called Guédelon. Using period garments, construction techniques, heritage crafts, and tools alongside sourcing only local materials, a crew of role-playing masons, blacksmiths, and carpenters have pounded at a facsimile of a 13th-century castle for almost 30 years. I’ve visited several times over the years, watching it evolve from a squelching sandstone pit the colour of iodine to a hulking four-towered fortress. I’ve often wondered whether it would work as a homesickness remedy (or would it be time sickness?) if we could outwit time and space to transport a 13th-century hired hand to the modern day. What would they think? Would it feel familiar? How close is this interpretation to the reality of that time?
It’s something I’ve thought about as I’ve played through Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which is in many ways its own archaeological experiment, albeit furrowed by a fictional story and coded polygons. Alongside its predecessor, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is the closest we’ve come to an authentic, gritty medieval sandbox; a detailed, ambitious window into the past made of a framework of stacked true-to-life systems that feel almost oppressive in their immersive qualities. Few games draw you into their world like this one. There’s almost an exotic, anomalous quality to its unyielding dedication to historical accuracy and how it ducks the lure of the fantasy tropes usually assigned to the Middle Ages. Like all archaeology and history, it’s still an interpretation, one that entertains rather than challenges the past. I reckon our fallen-through-time peasant might not be all at home paddling through what often feels like an arbitrary mess of romanticized medieval tropes.
As for me, I’ve waded through human faeces for corpses, played the carousing raconteur, succumbed to carnal pleasures, fleeced all and sundry of their groschen, dulled the sting of incisions provoked by bravado with wildflower brews, and plucked sometimes touching human strands from tangled quest lines. If you played the original, all of this will sound familiar. And it is. As sequels go, this isn’t so much a reinvention as iteration: sharper graphics, more refined systems, and a broader, thoughtfully hand-crafted open world to explore and discover. Less jank, fewer bugs, and a lone crash in over 100 hours of play; not bad considering the original’s creaking, shaky performance. In other words, more and better, a synthesis of the tried and tested, an awareness of the original’s pricklier cons, and the fear-of-failure dread of following up a commercial hit.
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I like Henry, the protagonist. He’s a bit of a sap and often flavourless, but he’s an endearing lad and his West Country lip is worth a few smirks. As the game starts, you’re sided by your trusty pal and insufferable oaf, Hans Capon, and his retinue to hand over a missive that could turn the tide of a knotty political jam. You set up camp for the night, drool over some bathing maidens, and watch as bandits sink rusty steel into your pals. After some forced tutorials, a brawl at a tavern, and a stint in the local stocks, you’re finally left to your own devices. Capon storms off into the rolling Bohemian hills and leaves a destitute Henry to press on with his quest to avenge his slaughtered parents. It’s a long old prologue and it’s hours before you finally get hold of your blank canvas Henry, stats reset by the marvels of video game logic, to convince the locals you’re not a scruffy lout but bodyguard to a foppish noble. In many ways, it’s a reliable slice of foreshadowing – Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is often an overcooked slog.
But before that, those first few hours of freedom (and those you set aside to wander later on) are when Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 shines brightest. Picking belladonna on the edge of crispy wheat fields in the late afternoon to a recital of cicada song – magic! Scampering off into the woods in your soiled briefs after a failed pickpocketing attempt – silly fun. Scrapping together groschen by selling loot dug up from graves on the edge of town – that rags-to-riches idyll playing out in tangible, player-led, real-time. It’s generously freeform fun with NPCs reacting to your every misstep and a layered, dynamic world packed with details: the intentional placement of villages based on topographic advantages, the NPC routines, Henry’s hygienic degradation, the effect of dress on people’s perception of Henry but also your conspicuousness, and, of course, the gruelling hangovers.
The clunky combat is back, somewhat tweaked to be more responsive, though that may be my hard-earned muscle memory from the original seeping through. Then there’s alchemy, lockpicking, pickpocketing, haggling, smithing, dice, countless skills checks, and heaps of perks to fashion together your own Henry. One of the hallmarks of a good RPG is a grounded sense of possibility. Agency. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has stacks of it, especially in the myriad ways quests can be solved. Objectives are often more suggestive than immutable. You can steal, talk, buy, fight, stealth, and finesse your way out of pretty much any situation, circumventing or even unearthing huge optional chunks of a quest with a spot of lateral thinking.
I found myself actively avoiding the main story until absolutely necessary, content with charting my own path through the mucky undergrowth of Bohemia. Much of that is due to the dryness of the narrative where you’re essentially a glorified task boy running from one avoidable problem to the next, often mopping up messes caused by Hans. It’s also strikingly at odds with the minimal hand-holding of roaming the open world quest-less. If I’m going to be running around in circles, I’d rather decide their circumference myself. It only gets worse once you graduate to the second of Kingdom Comes Deliverance 2’s maps, Kuttenberg and its environs, a huge city (by the series’ standards), which means more inconsequential fetch quests and settling of petty feuds between increasingly stereotyped characters.
Much like Henry’s fragile, easily depleted stamina, there comes a point where you’ll feel breathless, depleted by the minute-to-minute system wrangling, the endless inventory management, and the bottomless list of tasks, quests, and decisions thrown at you. It’s a game of excess and repetition. As much as I’m a glutton for the original, the carrot dangled isn’t quite appealing enough to lead you to the credits. After a while, I stopped giving a toss about Henry’s fate, let alone, Hans’.
Part of this is due to the wildly inconsistent quality of the quest design. Some quests are a repetitious, sedate bore where you’ll speak to buddy guy only to be redirected to matey boy over there, and so on and so forth, until you have a scrap with a mouthy bum, and then have to scuttle back to the quest giver. Others are these generous surprises that tap into all that ‘realism’ groundwork to produce memorable little anecdotes that linger in the mind. In one, a livestock massacre leads to a folklore-driven dive into a mine shaft that plays out as a survival-horror sequence. In another, you’ll accompany a knacker on his rounds, an insightful little peek into one of the lowest rungs of medieval social stratification. You’ll paint a phallus on a cow to fuel a territorial dispute, attend a boozy wedding, role-play as a scholar, play cupid, and forge knock-off swords.
One of the best early game quests involves settling a family feud among a clan of Roma nomads, the minutiae of their cultural mores guiding Henry’s problem-solving options. Similarly, the Turkic Cumans, which were portrayed in the original as snarling, marauding foreigners are humanised, with one quest seeing Henry settling a punch-up at the local tavern, which, if played right, leads to a delightful, soused evening where language barriers topple and differences are set aside.
The laddish misogyny is still there as are the cliches of matronly innkeepers and wenches spitting common-as-muck caricatures of estuary accents. And, well, many are there as obsequious ornaments to be bedded more than anything else. But there’s more agency and grit given to supporting women characters. You’ll also encounter a learned, Malian physician, which while a welcome surprise given creative director Daniel Vavra’s ‘realism’ posturing to justify the original’s anaemic ethnic diversity, feels perfunctory and like a placating salve aimed at critics. It’s a mixed bag, and I’ll leave it to those with sharper minds to unravel the authenticity of these depictions.
My lasting impression of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is one of fatigue, of a work at odds with itself, at times forcibly doubling down on the idea of a dense and complex medieval simulation, and at others, intent on reminding you that this is a video game, leaning into unrestrained gamified glut. As a player, you’re constantly hopping between these two poles, never quite sure if Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is taking itself too seriously or not seriously enough. If you enjoyed the original, you’ll find the same brand of satisfying RPG in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and, if you have the stamina, plenty of reasons to stay in its world. If you bounced off the original, I’d wager you’ll struggle just as much to enjoy the sequel.
Reviewed on PC. Review code provided by the publisher.
