This roguelike city-builder casts you as a benevolent Lord of the Rings villain, and its Steam Next Fest demo accidentally consumed my entire evening

On the final evening of Steam Next Fest, I had a choice to make. Several uninterrupted hours lay between me and the end of the week, and several hundred demos meant I had myriad potential ways to fill that time. I narrowed my search to try and find a quick, popcorn-y roguelike, the kind of thing that might let me turn my brain off for a while before the start of the work week, but my eye wandered to the bright red banner of The King is Watching.

A roguelike, yes. But a roguelike city-builder? On a quiet Sunday evening, I wasn't sure I had the brain space required to start micromanaging peasants, let alone when there were actual stakes involved. After all, I'd get enough of that at work on Monday (editor's note: rude). Nevertheless, I resolved to try out the demo, safe in the knowledge that many easier options would still be available if I bounced off. Five hours of city-building (and three crumbled cities) later, that turned out to not be an issue.

The King is Watching puts you in control of a Sauron-esque monarch whose gilded eye watches over portions of its kingdom. You can fill the space behind your city walls with buildings that will gather or refine resources or produce troops and magic spells to use against the waves of enemies that approach to tear those walls down. The catch, however, is that they'll only actually do any work when you're actively watching over them. If I'm forced to turn my attention to the barracks to ensure I'm producing enough soldiers to defend the city, the farmers gathering the wheat I need to feed those soldiers tend to start slacking off.

The result is a tricky balancing act. You can move different buildings around, but doing so comes at a hefty cost to production, so it's no use at all when you're trying to produce an army in a rush. You can expand your field of vision to watch more tiles at once, but that's an expensive process that often relies on resources you might not even want to produce. Certain resources, like water, are key to expansion at the start but aren't worthy of taking up a spot later on - until you suddenly find yourself needing to sow a new wheat field over a dry patch of earth.

The constant push and pull between gathering, refining, and spending resources is balanced further against your need to defend yourself. New waves of enemies will spawn at a pretty sharp cadence, and while you probably won't struggle to fend off a few goblin skirmishers at first, their ranks swell substantially over time. Expanding your army is important, but finding room to house them in a city where space is at a premium is another weight added to the complexity of your resource balancing act. Thankfully, For the King offers an interesting tool to help adjust the fight in your favor - every few waves, you'll be visited by your court oracle, who will prophesy the enemies that you'll be facing. A risk-reward structure means that harder fights offer better loot if you win, but you can also sacrifice those higher-tier prizes if you need some time to rebuild your army after a bloody battle.

I stumbled through my first run, eventually meeting my end once the first boss - a towering and terrifyingly tanky ogre - showed up and smashed down my city walls. But on my second attempt, things started to click into place; I had a better sense of where and when to focus my gaze; I began to manipulate the prophecy system to actually meet my short-term needs rather than my long-term goals; I learned to arrange and rearrange my city to match that resource balancing act. Thanks to The King is Watching's upgrade system, I made it past that first boss, and then I got further still on my next run. Before I knew it, I'd chewed through hours of my Sunday evening and many hundreds of goblin marauders and was still weighing up how I'd improve my strategy on my next attempt.

Sadly, I ran out of evening, and with Next Fest over, I'll have to wait for the full version to see how those new plans play out. But I'm very excited for that - the demo seemed to be a pretty limited slice of The King is Watching, with more upgrades, enemies, and Kings themselves planned for the full release. It's shaping up to be a deep experience, which is almost daunting given how much I got out of the demo. Coupled with some charming pixel art, it's ended up as one of my real Next Fest highlights, which is something I never would have guessed at while I was mulling over whether or not to even give it a try in the first place.

The King is Watching wasn't the only roguelike/city-builder to impress in Steam Next Fest.