[PAX East] Hands on with Adult Swim’s Kingsway

I miss Windows 3.1. It wasn’t an amazing operating system, and the amount of windows and pop-ups to manage became downright infuriating at times, but that was perhaps part of its charm.

Adult Swim’s upcoming Kingsway looks to turn that experience into a full RPG, and I’m pleasantly surprised at how well it works.

Kingsway revels in the days of classic PC design, from the stacking of OS windows to the pop-up loading bars to double-clicking on folders. The game is a full RPG, featuring a plot, customizable characters and classes. It has guilds, quests, side quests, magic, leveling up and everything else we’d expect out of a modern RPG, but it just does all this through a retro PC design straight out of the Eighties/early Nineties. These aren’t just UI choices, either; in many ways they’re integral to the game design.

As new events occur or our main menus accessed, windows will pop up. These can stay open for eternity, closed away, or minimized into the dock. Keeping them open leads to clutter, sure, but it also lets us see everything all at once. We’ll learn early on to manage and arrange these windows as we desire, finally settling on something that works well for our play styles. During battles the attack windows move around the screen in unique patterns per each enemy type, so that we need to chase them around the screen. This can get chaotic when more than one enemy is in play, as windows open for each, but that chaos is actually enjoyable.

The battles themselves consist of alternating between attacking and defending, and understanding when to stop and start each of those during fights. Waiting too long to block leads to more damage, but blocking for too long misses attack opportunities.

There’s more about the classic OS style, too. Loading bars occur to show us movement and battles, notifications in our quick start menu tells us when we have guild messages, and our storage sack is a scrolling window that can fill up too quickly if we’re not careful.

It really does feel like we’re sucked into an operating system, albeit one that just happens to manage RPG exploration and not financial spreadsheets. I requested to the developers that it’s so realistic, perhaps a Microsoft Word-style notepad window would be great to have up, just in case the boss catches us playing at work. “See, Tom, I’m actually just working on tomorrow’s presentation.”

Kingsway is a neat concept, and my demo time proved to me that it could work. Developed by Andrew Morrish, the game is scheduled to launch later this year on PC.