GAME REVIEW: Kingdom Death - Monster (2015)
Ugh, what an utter disappointment this game was. There were so many things wrong with it that I can’t even start talking about it without breaking it down into a few different elements. Let’s get started, shall we?
Concept
I was easily sold on this game. It was promoted as Dark Souls meets Civilization and Monster Hunter. It’s about survival in a harsh, scary world, full of monsters and BS. As a fan of board games and Souls-gaming in general, I love a good challenge.
Unfortunately, in execution this was largely overstated. There isn’t a lot of opportunity to RP (roleplay) characters because you’re liable to lose them, and the game isn’t styled in a way that you can RP at all. This means, ultimately, that the civilization part of the game is a very small percentage, when realistically, the civilization should’ve been the biggest part of the game. There was little allowance for our group to build the civilization we wanted: players are stuck drawing cards at random to see what you even can innovate. This means that even though you are in desperate need of a hospital, you can only make a hospital if you’re lucky enough to draw it from the deck and even then, the usage was so limited. Too many aspects of the civilization phase were controlled and shouldn’t have been. This was the place where the players should’ve been able to play around and have fun. Instead, it’s all luck-based. A lot of the innovations you get are really half-useless too, so frankly, I think the entire civilization part of the game was very poorly designed as a whole.
Then there’s the hunt phase, which should be exciting because you’re rolling on a D100 table, like you would with Arabian Nights, to get some story events from your hunt. This is annoying because you can roll the same number. Who wants to encounter cancer crows twice? We should’ve homebrewed a rule that we don’t use the same roll twice so we’d experience more, but that’s a pain the ass. The civilization phase also has these moments (sometimes? I was never sure when) that could be interesting, but there’s always a chance of getting fucked at every turn. A lot of the times we’d come into a hunt at full strength and already be fucked and half-dead by the time we got there, regardless of how careful we were during the hunt. There also really wasn’t any opportunity for fun in here either - this is another place where I’d have liked some RP elements so I could explore and seek out interesting things from the lore, but that’s never a possibility.
As for the Dark Souls meets Monster Hunter parts of the game, it is indeed hard, but Souls-gaming is hard but fair. There is logic, so “git gud” is some of the best advice you can give for those games. In KDM, you’re as liable to roll well and fuck yourself all the same. While very few aspects to the game have a good outcome, everything is guaranteed to have a bad outcome. This means that the game is not fair, it’s designed to make you mad. In fact, for me, it feels like it was designed by a guy who spent his youth trolling people on the internet.
So conceptually, I loved the idea, but in execution, it was a big old fail.
Art
Stylistically, the art is beautiful, creepy, and wonderfully done. I like the high customization of miniatures and the DIY minis were a lot of fun to build and design. It may have, in fact, been the highlight of the game.
That said, a lot of the art is extremely sexist, pretty much towards both genders. Does Adam Poots know that the average nerd isn’t a horny virgin living in his parents basement anymore? Pendulous breasts and tiny loincloths and all the male fantasies are not mandatory in nerd art these days. We don’t all want to masturbate to our characters. Time to get past the sexism already, it’s really old.
In-Game Logic
I will excuse most things in a game as long as they follow some logic, but despite all the efforts of lore-building and making mechanics, there is surprisingly little real logic in the game. For example, what is a lantern year? A civilization only needs to do one hunt in a lantern year, which seems like it wouldn’t be enough to support a budding civilization. As well, whenever you “innovate” procreation, your new babies are already ready to go out to battle the next year. So one hunt is enough to feed an entire civilization for one of their years, and in that time, a person can be born and raised to the age of being a capable fighter. Zero logic there. That’s just one of a few thousand examples, I’m sure, but the lack of logic (you can’t flee a fight, for example) really creates a lot of bullshit in the game that the game can’t explain its way out of. And yes, of course it always ends up fucking you royally. The game simply favors randomness over anything, which is total crap - a game has to be fair within its own ruleset. If the player is going to get fucked doing something productive half the time, then it would only be logical that a failure could still do something good for you. But nope. The game is purely out to get you 100% of the time and there are 0 opportunities for something good to happen on a bad roll. That’s again not good gaming or storytelling, that’s trolling. Quoting a review, “This game offers all the excitement of playing a group of unarmed peasants being killed by a dragon.”
Gameplay
Overly complicated for what it needs to be, if I’m being honest. When we first tried to play the game, we actually had a GM - it’s not recommended but it should be, because having a player also be in charge of the rules was a lot harder, as we learned in our second campaign. There are always things in the book that one of the players shouldn’t know and are able to spoil by reading.
There’s also an issue of pacing in the gameplay. It starts out way too hard, but as you get weapons and armor, you get a little bit better, until you reach a point where your hunts are boring grinds that still manage to take too long no matter how much you level (which, incidentally, you can’t - you can’t do more than one hunt a year, because game rules and no other reason). You start with a tutorial lion, then move on to the white lion, screaming antelope, and eventually phoenix. The game takes 25 lantern years (which in itself makes no sense, as I already mentioned), yet if you have a nemesis fight you also lose the opportunity to do a hunt. Some of those nemeses are more or less impossible battles, where you’ll not even really get much out of winning or surviving. So this means you’re trapped with the same three enemies, more or less, that simply get harder to fight, but not more interesting or engaging. So the battles become an utter slog, while we’re still robbed of any chance to have some fun in the civilization. You’re even teased at some bosses that you never meet - if there’s a Kingsman and Hand of the King… who is the king? Where is his kingdom? Can we find it? (The answer is no). Then you reach the final boss and… it’s not that bad. It was a little boring, even if we lost two players. It was a pretty lackluster finale. As another reviewer on BoardGameGeek said, “I simply can't envision a scenario where I wouldn't rather play an actual RPG like DnD than spend my time playing another session of this game.”
Mechanics
Let’s get even more nitpicky here. I hated most of the mechanics for this game, as I’m a great lover of DnD and its interactive RP mechanics. These battles ultimately felt like grinding in a tactical RPG video game, but without very much fun. Most of the tactical decision-making in the game was centered around deck manipulation and just deciding who goes in what order each turn. The limited scope of moves, the limitations on armor and weaponry, the inability to heal despite taking hefty injuries repeatedly, the inability to flee when you know you’re screwed… it’s all bad mechanics. In any of our fights, there were always two people who more or less weren’t even in the fight, as they were dedicating their turns to making sure we didn’t draw Traps from the AI deck. This game was just begging for RP aspects and has absolutely none. I’d love to have tested some real stats against these monsters, rather than just what my armor and weapons had to offer. If I wanted to do raid grinds with my pals, I’d play MMORPGs and get a lot more satisfaction out of it.
It also tries to cram way too much into the game. The civilization phase is overly-complicated yet completely impossible to customize. The battles are slogs and the only thing that changes the fights up are a few different move-sets. The hunt phase is also random - sometimes it’s overly long and fucky, sometimes you get lucky and maybe one good thing happens, but overall, I’d have enjoyed this more if it was an exploration mechanic, as opposed to random-gen by die rolls.
Now, the gear grid system isn’t really bad in itself, but it seems like the cards aren’t designed with this grid in mind. For example, it’s easy enough to get red affinities, pretty easy for greens, but the blues were always hard to get and harder to match on the grid, so it’s not a very balanced system.
As well, a lot of die rolling is on tables, where the tables are unbalanced. In good RPGs like DnD and the like, DMs have a table to work with that they can adjust themselves. In this game, the tables were often unbalanced so that the bad results were far more common than the good. Also, a D10 doesn’t divide nicely, and it was pointed out to me that a lot of the tables were missing a 7 (split at 1-3, 4-6, 8-9, and 10), so the game wasn’t even well-though-out in this sense. In the battles, there’s also a lot of roll-to-hit followed by roll-to-damage, but you can fail at doing damage, which seems like a big fuck you after you’ve already successfully landed your hit. There’s also no logic to hitting and then seeing where you hit after the fact.
As well, there are certain things in the game that can only be achieved in a basically nonexistent probability. This includes elements like certain item drops or victory conditions, mostly involving the bosses. However, in order to get these, you need to often do something insane, like critting twice or other thing that are probability-wise impossible to achieve. Yet the game doesn’t allow more than one hunt a year, so you can’t eve grind for these things if you want to experience them (or more of the story and world). As another reviewer put it, “Tough decisions is what makes a horror theme. Randomness is the literal opposite of a decision.” It also makes this game massively un-fun for anyone who isn’t really interested in the tactics.
Story
One of the most underdeveloped parts of the game. There’s a lot of lore in here with some serious potential, but it’s all wasted in the hopes that people will play this hot mess repeatedly. It seems like they were trying for an oppressingly dark and unfair world, but even our own depressingly dark and unfair world allows for good things to happen. I don’t enjoy the feeling of living in an internet troll’s fantasy.
There’s a lot of weird and interesting stuff in the lore, but because you don’t get to RP, you never really get to explore this aspect of the game. There’s so much potential in this setting for interesting things, but instead of allowing players to RP their way through it, it’s all down to randomness. Because everything is pre-meditated too, they choices are always, essentially, “touch the trap” or “don’t touch the trap,” which isn’t very interesting, especially if you like nuance as much as I do. Also, pretty much everything will just insta-kill you if you roll bad. There isn’t really a story, it’s just roll a die and get told what happens. Here’s a quote from another review: “When the game tells me to draw a random card, which tells me to roll a die, which then points at a reference table that claims I have achieved/failed something, then *I* have not actually achieved/failed anything. I haven't even participated.” The game is essentially playing itself.
There’s also the weird sexism in here, wherein it’s all about coupling and reproducing… but why? Didn’t the players all pop up out of the ground in the first place? Why, then, is heterosexual sex the most important part of the game? Couldn’t we get new characters walking into town or find survivors out on the hunt (the former is possible, but only rarely). I could also talk about how obsessed the game is with gonads and randomly inserts weird sexualized things at really inappropriate times. You know, the weird thong was amusing, but is there ever an opportunity where having it would benefit you? I doubt it.
(STORY SPOILERS)
The idea of the underlying story is that one of the world’s monsters is, in fact, the lantern. Yes, that’s right, the lantern aka Watcher is asleep and functions much like a deep-sea angler fish. The lantern lures people in to make settlements and then, once every 25 or so lantern years, it awakens and devours them all. It’s actually a pretty cool idea in the whole, but it’s not foreshadowed, teased, or in any way built-up. We, as players, simply knew that this was how long the campaign lasts, but we didn’t know why, which was lame. Then, once you defeat the Watcher, you are greeted with perhaps the shittiest ending of anything since Game of Thrones crapped all over George R.R. Martin’s work. Yes, that’s right. The game could’ve left things open, saying that you’ve defeated the Watcher but now you no longer have lanterns to light your way… will you survive? But no, the game outright states that you’re doomed without light (even though I’m pretty sure that if we innovated hospitals, we also innovated fire, which brings me back to the lack of logic). You can keep playing, but you’ll all die eventually.
What the actual fuck?
If that isn’t the trolliest way of ending a game, I don’t know what is. By saying that you’re fucked no matter what, you suck away all the joy of playing. Every struggle you went through, every amazing character that you lost for stupid reasons, all the fights you had with your friends during your play sessions about how or what to do… it would have all been worth it to know that once you defeated the Watcher, you’ve succeeded! But rather than even allowing an open ending, the game robs of you that by doing what, to me, feels like a “lol haha fuck you” and tells you that even when you win, you lose. Hell, even no ending text would have been better than this garbage. We were all amped up to celebrate our victory, but this completely sucked the wind from our sails. As the world learned from Game of Thrones, there’s a big difference between subverting expectations and being surprising. Unfortunately, this was neither a subversion of expectations or a surprise. It was just outright stupid and a shitty thing to do to the players. It robs us of our agency as well as our ending. Fuck that shit.
Cost & Physical Product
Maybe the biggest disappointment of the game was the sheer magnitude of the price of it, at several hundreds of dollars. This could’ve been divided in many ways to be more cost-acceptable, with the minis as a separate aspect and a cheaper base game. We bought this as a group and I’m still annoyed at the price of it, simply because the quality was such a let-down. It’s a pretty half-baked and untested product for such a hefty pricetag. Definitely not worth it. Also worth mentioning, is that the minis are very fragile and there is no tray to store them in, so they tend to break a lot.
~
Ultimately, while I enjoy spending time with my friends in any format, this game just sucked. However, I’d love to explore this concept and world more. Maybe if no one else does it, someday I’ll get around to making a DnD mod for this world. Until then, you can count on me never touching this game again. Definitely not worth the cost or time spent.
[ed (2024): I am currently making a TTRPG module for Zweihänder, inspired by the few good parts of KDM, so if you’re interested in that, keep an eye open around here or sign up for my newsletter, as I might release the module in the next few years!]
