Free demo for roguelike city builder lets you keep an eye on your lazy peasants
The King is Watching is a roguelike city builder where you build your kingdom and defend it against a wave of increasingly challenging monsters. The catch? Your peasants and workers love sleeping on the job and won't work unless you keep them under your constant gaze.
As King, you must ensure your kingdom has enough resources to train an army. But that won't happen unless you make like Sauron and train your harsh gaze upon them. As you gain wheat, water, and wood, you create buildings for research, clay mines, and barracks to train soldiers.
Make buildings on a grid and monitor them by moving around your vision cone. Any area not being monitored will not produce resources, forcing you to be diligent in resource management. Instead of turns, there is an advancing timeline on top, which will count down to the next enemy wave.
Defeating enemies gives you money, blueprints for buildings, and prophecies, which allow you to control what enemies you will face next. You select between randomized cards, which show you upcoming spawn waves.
You can select up to three, and the more challenging encounters will yield greater rewards. It's a relatively simple loop that is addictive and requires some thought on balancing your resources for challenging waves while deciding your encounters based on what you have.
The game has a retro-inspired and crunchy pixel art style, with chill music that ramps up appropriately during battles. The King is Watching doesn't have a release date yet, but if the demo is any indication, it could be worth keeping an eye on.
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