Before the Fog Door, There Was a Corridor With No Light in It

The first skeleton in King's Field doesn't run at you. It walks. It comes down the corridor at the speed of a man carrying something heavy, and that gives you time — plenty of time — to decide what to do. So you decide to swing. Your sword takes about a second and a half to come around. The skeleton is still coming. And you understand, roughly a heartbeat too late, that the time was never yours. The game was lending it to you so that you'd commit.

I died. I died a great many times.

I'm not nostalgic for King's Field because I was good at it. I came to it backwards, years after Demon's Souls had already taught me its lessons in a nicer coat, and it felt like reading a book in a language I only spoke badly. I could see the grammar. I knew where the sentences were going. I still tripped over every one of them.

So when I read that Freshly Baked Games is making Queen's Domain — an explicit King's Field homage, first-person, retro-fantasy, the clue right there in the title — my reaction wasn't "oh, a Soulslike." It was: someone is finally digging in the right place. The Souls boom has been strip-mined for difficulty for a decade and a half. Everyone copied the punishing part. Almost nobody copied the part underneath it, which is that you cannot take the swing back, and the level is not a corridor between fights — the level is the fight.

Now, the honest bit, because I'd rather be useful than enthusiastic. I haven't played Queen's Domain. Not one hour of it. I'm not going to pretend those five hours belong to me. What I have played is the thing it's building on, and that's enough to know the shape of the ambition.

Here's what I want from it. First-person means you can only see what you're facing. That sounds like a technical detail. It's the entire emotional engine. Third-person Souls gives you a camera that swivels; you can feel a room behind you even when you're not looking at it. King's Field never let you do that. Your fear lived in the back of your own skull, and every corner you turned was a decision you made with your whole body. Put a torch in my hand, take my peripheral vision away, and I will be more afraid of a hallway than I've been of most boss arenas in years.

Strange bedfellow: 2002. King's Field IV: The Ancient City and Metroid Prime both land that year, both first-person, both quietly obsessed with the terror of looking. One of them sold millions and the other one is a footnote, and they were teaching the same lesson — that a helmet is a small dark room you carry with you. Nobody puts those two games in the same sentence. I think about it constantly.

This is the part where I say something about niche and failure. Queen's Domain is not going to do Elden Ring numbers, and that's fine. A game that changes one player is more successful than a game that pleased millions. Most people bounced off King's Field in the mid-nineties, and every one of them who stuck around was handed a key to everything FromSoftware would ever make. Small audiences aren't a failure state. They're a filter that only lets the right people through.

I'll play it. I'll probably set it down at some point — I have a bad habit of walking away from games and a worse habit of pretending I don't — but I always come back, and I know I'll come back to this one. I retired from King's Field IV for a while too. It's still on the shelf, waiting, and I don't feel bad about that.

Meanwhile there's a corridor under an island in 1994 that's about to get a lot more foot traffic. Good. It earned it.