Kingdom's Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster by developer and publisher Inti Creates—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes.
Kingdom's Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster is Inti Creates latest project. Blending 2D side-scrolling and town building simulation, you'll be venturing through a small interesting world as you try to restore a kingdom whose time has been stolen from it.
Kingdom's Return is a title that took some time to digest how I felt about it. Sporting a 5~6 hour runtime, it both felt complete and like the introduction to something larger. With four available characters to start with, and then switch between after the tutorial stage, there is flexibility in how you approach the adventure. The Imperial offers a balance of physical offense and defence. The Wizard offers long range combat through spells. The Alchemist offers medium ranged combat with status effects. Finally, the dual-weidling Zipangu offers pure offense that I used from start to finish after having gone through the tutorial with all four characters.
On that note, it would have been a good idea for the game to mention that you could switch characters once you’ve started. The option is hidden under the character tab in a small R1 change character which I only noticed before the final boss making it a little pointless for me to change direction at that point. At least I knew the basics of what each offered me from running the tutorial 4 times.
In terms of gameplay, Inti Creates doesn’t disappoint. The 2D side-scrolling and mild platforming is as responsive as you would expect it to be. Once you pick up a mission in town, you’ll venture forth into a 3d area where chibi monster “blobs” roam around on the way to your destination. If you bump into these, you’ll be brought into the 2D side-scrolling format to fight your way through. Once completed, you can resume your journey to your destination or bump into others for more experience points and potential loot.
The areas themselves are a combination of many 2D maps stitched together in “floors”. Each floor will increase in difficulty, but it will also provide more loot that you can use to either temporarily power yourself up, or, give you an item that will stay with you until the end of the mission. These items range from automatically restoring your hit points over time to better defense against status effects like being burnt or paralyzed.
The format of these areas will also change depending on the mission. Standard acquisition of an item will lead you through a floor or two, while boss missions require you to make it all the way to the end. What’s appreciated with this format is that as you level up and are searching for materials that you’ll need to rebuild the town, more on that shortly, you can after 1 “room” skip directly to the next “floor” saving you time and possible hit points. The trade off, because there is always one for shortcuts, is that you won’t be picking up as many crafting materials or character equipment.
This all said, the combat options felt a bit toned down compared to other works in Inti Creates’ library. From each character’s standard attack, there are a few abilities that use either the up or down motion with the attack button to perform abilities. Special abilities that require mana points are used through the R2 button and are much more powerful and more limited because of the mp pool. You can spam the abilities if you want to, but then you are on your own until your mana restores itself high enough to use them again.
All of this leads back to your home base that you have been tasked with restoring to its former glory by the King and the Greater Fairy Chronos that acts as your companion on this journey. Given a decent sized grid, you have the choice of one of four castle types to replace the dilapidated one that you bulldoze when given the keys to the restoration project. Each castle type will specifically enhance certain attributes so it’s best to pick the one that will make sense for your primary adventurer. From there, you can build a variety of buildings such as blacksmiths, accessory shops, theatres and more which will all increase your character’s base stats.
Where things become a little tricky is with your budget. Everything is expensive. Each building, road extension, or decoration on the map, needs either gold, gold and materials, or a LOT of gold and a LOT of materials to put it into place. The gameplay loop is designed to make you rinse and repeat to make this feel more natural but oftentimes I felt like the loops were not giving me enough to keep up with the renovations making me have to leave and come back two or three times to really get something done.
Then there is the building itself which has a lot of good ideas, but needs a lot of refinement. Each castle comes with a zone that will enhance the stats provided by the buildings if they are touching any part of that grid. If you cluster things together too tightly, you can decrease the bonuses. If you build too many roads, you can decrease the bonuses. You can also only have so many buildings on the map, meaning that you can’t build them all and have to pick and choose when it’s all said and done.
Furthermore, moving things around is anything but cheap and a lot of the decorations, such as trees and lamposts, can only be destroyed, not moved. As these things are anything but cheap in the first place, it makes it much harder to want to move things around and make things pretty once you’ve figured things out because it would be a waste of money and resources that are a bit slower to come in. This was really unfortunate, because as you renovate the buildings from level 1, to 2, and then to 3, they get bigger and the visual style or balance that you were going for could be erased in an instant.
On a final note, while I enjoyed my overall time with Kingdom’s Return, I think my biggest issue(s) weren’t with the gameplay. Even if I have less than a warm and fuzzy feeling around the building mechanics, I think my issue was with the story. Heavy in the beginning, it just disappears afterwards. Pick a mission, set up, come back, try to renovate, leave. But what about the *waves at everything* everything that we are trying to figure out? Something literally stole time from this kingdom and we are just quietly rebuilding?
There are a few small dialog options that can be viewed by visiting the town but not much else. The story honestly only kicked back in 2 minutes to midnight and then it was all over. I feel like there was so much more that could have been present as that quietness made the overall experience feel empty. Like we were doing all of this for nothing especially with the amount of townsfolk and shop owners that are present.
Overall, Kingdom's Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster has some great ideas, but feels more like an introduction with its very short runtime and rudimentary building mechanics.
Score: 7 / 10
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