Let us be honest with each other. Little King's Story looks cute and friendly and childlike, with colorful graphics and a classical soundtrack. It is a trap.
The further I get into this game, the weirder it gets, on several levels. Your adorable, childlike king, who has stumbled across a magic crown that entitles him to rule the backwater kingdom of Alpoko, is on a mission to unite the entire world under his rule. His ruthless ambition is stopped by nothing; not the neighboring nations' military superiority, not basic common sense, and certainly not being surrounded on all sides by hungry monsters. He thinks he should rule the world, so damn it, he will, and the game is so damned cute that it's easy to miss that the protagonist is a monster.
Little King's Story is like Baby's First Machiavelli. I'm having a very strange kind of fun with it.
Produced by Yasuhiro "I created Harvest Moon" Wada, Little King's Story is basically a real-time strategy game. You control the King, who is basically helpless. You have very low health and cannot attack.
Fortunately, thanks to your magical crown, you can compel citizens of your kingdom to unthinking obedience. They line up behind you, all Lemmings-style, and can be dispatched to fulfill tasks on your behalf. To send one out, press A; a citizen will run out to about half the screen's width and start interacting with anything he encounters. The game is about knowing when and how to use your citizens, when to call them back to avoid taking casualties, and how effectively you can multitask.
Exploring the world feels a little like your basic Metroidvania model, as beating bosses allows you to add more land to your kingdom. That, in turn, lets you build new facilities, training citizens to do more and more varied jobs for you. At the start of the game, the world is a very small place, bordered on all sides by fallen trees, impassible rivers, and monster territory. One bit at a time, you can explore further and further into it, teaching citizens how to circumvent the obstacles in your way, before finding your way to rival kings and systematically deposing them.
Little King's Story is unashamedly weird in a way that you just don't see much of anymore. The most dangerous creature in the world is arguably an angry chicken. The last enemy king you must defeat isn't really a king so much as a random conglomeration of ideas shaped like a boss, ruling over a mostly-theoretical "kingdom" of junk and rubble. At one point, you need to recruit somebody to help you destroy a bunch of giant hard-boiled eggs that are blocking your progress, and there are l33t-speaking Greys all the hell over the place. I feel like I've been playing somebody's fever dream.
This isn't quite an endorsement, is it? Little King's Story stands out in my mind mostly for being strange as hell; it's a genre beerslam that somehow works, and a tale of a little boy who becomes history's most powerful bastard while still looking like the protagonist of a children's book. It's an ambitious, deeply bizarre game that deserves a look by just about anyone, if only because it's goddamned crazy.
