The Golden King

In most areas of IF, I feel very well-qualified to offer my opinions: I’ve played and reviewed hundreds and hundreds of games by this point, and I’ve written both a puzzlefest and a narrative-focused game, which are experiences that made me spend a bunch of time thinking about issues of craft that are pretty broadly applicable. I’m also a middle-aged white guy, which helps with the whole not-overly-questioning-whether-the-world-needs-to-hear-my-judgments thing. But there are definitely categories where I don’t have the lived experience or theoretical tools to feel like I have much of interest to share. And short, sharp aesthetic experiences that rely as much on graphics and audio as on writing and design are pretty much my kryptonite – so guess what The Golden King is?

At least this is a short game – I took about 7 minutes to play through it twice – so I was able to turn on the audio, which is good since there are no subtitles and you really need to hear the narration to get what’s going on. The game’s a retelling of the King Midas myth, in graphical form: you control a chess king and use the arrow keys to move it through a small checkerboard area, with the voice-over giving you the backstory and commenting on the action. There’s nothing to do but to go down the hallway and move through the three rooms one offer – one represents the palace grounds, filled with trees, another has other chessmen standing in for your courtiers and soldiers, and in the center is a high table piled with food, behind which stand a queen and pawn (your family). As you move, you turn everything next to you into gold, including the ground, the walls, and of course, the people and things you encounter.

The key twist here is that this is an unrepentant Midas: rather than falling into despair at seeing his loved ones turned to brilliant but dead gold, and unable to eat food that’s transformed into metal in his throat, he actually thinks this is great, somehow managing to sustain himself from pure satiated greed, and his powers wind up expanding until they create an ending very different from the canonical myth. The story is quite abbreviated, and more focused on O Henry wit than pathos, but it’s still well done, I think, and obviously has some contemporary resonance even if there’s not a lot to be done with it. The language is good, adopting an elevated register appropriate to the myth without being portentous. Since there are no subtitles possibly I’m slightly misquoting, but here’s a 90% accurate transcription of what you hear when you blunder into the forest area:

The king delighted at seeing the plants and animals in the palace grounds transformed into trinkets more lovely than any his craftsmen could cast.

The graphic and audio touches also help sell the arc – especially the sound, which sees different tracks of ambient noise drop off as you progress, replaced by an austere and dreadful wind.

It all seems to work well, but again, I feel I’m on thin ice as a critic; Golden King is more about mood and vibes than anything else, and the audiovisual elements are load-bearing ones, so I wish I could say something more useful than just “they seem good”. But they do seem good, albeit in service to a narrative that’s not especially robust or interesting in itself; if you turned just the words into a Twine or Inform game, I think most players would shrug at its simplicity and linearity (possibly there’s an alternate path through the game if you simply stay put and refuse to turn everything and everyone around you to gold, but having worked myself into a lather about the way Everyone’s Invited tried my patience, I didn’t have the self-control to give this a real go). That’s not a critique of Golden King as much as it is of my own limitations, though – I may not be champing at the bit to be the world’s second-most-prolific reviewer of highly-curated aesthetically bold experiences that engage all the senses, but I can’t object to seeing one or two high-quality examples of the form pop up in the Comp.