Adult Swim Games has just announced a new PC RPG called Kingsway, which will be released sometime this summer, though an exact date hasn’t been confirmed.
While a title like Kingsway might sound like a typical RPG that involves wizards, knights, dungeons, and, probably, kings, this is Adult Swim we’re talking about here. So, as you can probably guess, things are much, much stranger than that. Before we fully dive in, check out this trailer:
Instead of heading out on some sort of quest for glory, the game is actually based on an operating system that looks like something from the mid-1990s. To play, you have to click on different folders, launch different programs, and manage a whole series of windows that house different information.
In one window, for example, you’ll have your character profile while in another there’s a map and in yet another, you’ll find your inventory. Your screen gets cluttered quickly and only gets more chaotic as time goes on. So, if all that sounds overwhelming, it’s supposed to be. Here’s what a typical game looks like:
Once you get a hang of the way the game looks, it gets even crazier because monsters can turn up in the form of pop-ups that move around the screen, making you follow them around while managing all of the other windows. The game is more about multitasking and managing all of these different menus than it is about slaying monsters and completing quests (which come in the form of email notifications, by the way).
The bad news is that if you die, it’s game over and your next game will be completely different because the game is randomly generated each time, making it hard to learn from your mistakes since next playthrough may create a whole new problem that you haven’t seen before.
On the actual RPG side of things, players can choose to be good or evil, go on adventures to find treasures in tombs, create a personalized character, and do many of the tasks that traditional RPG’s offer. Then something like this happens and you remember you’re not playing a normal game:
In a way, Kingsway takes the normal gaming experience and turns it on its head. If you were to take away the monsters and swords, the game would feel like you’re struggling to keep a virus-filled Windows 95 PC from utterly destroying itself. In other words, it’s super meta because you’re playing a game (the RPG) inside another game (the operating system), mimicking what you are actually doing in real life–playing Kingsway on your real computer’s operating system–which is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Adult Swim content.
Though Adult Swim Games will publish Kingsway sometime this summer, the game was actually created by a solo developer named Andrew Morrish, who previously developed other online games, such as Go Home Dizzy and Tough Love Machine. It’s unknown if Morrish was approached by Adult Swim or pitched it them through their open pitching portal, a page one their site where you can pitch your game if you wanted. Either way, Adult Swim is taking risks, and it’s exciting to see even if it looks like one of the most stressful, odd, and pop-up-filled RPG experiences about to hit the market.
Will you be checking out Kingsway? Let us know in the comments.
Image Credits: Andrew Morrish/Adult Swim