Keep a close eye on your kingdom in The King is Watching

The King is Watching from Hypnohead and tinyBuild is a unique micro-management roguelite kingdom builder that will suck you right in. Note: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

It's a strange blend of kingdom building micro-management for the resources and production, along with real-time auto-battle when it comes to the battles. You place down building tiles in a small area, and move around your gaze to make the tiles actually activate and run their production. Your gaze tile range is limited, so it's a game of constant micro where you're always watching your resources to build them up, and then move your gaze around again to build up something else. Impressively clever, and very different to other such games and due to this your full attention will be completely absorbed by it.

You know, it actually reminded me a little of Tetris in the way you're arranging the kingdom tiles and your gaze together. At least initially that is. It's obviously nothing like it, but I couldn't help but feel that when starting off in it. It's all about making perfect use of the space you've got to maximise your resource income with your limited area of gaze. Getting the tiles in the right place is one of the most difficult things about it, and can easily make you lose if you're not prepared enough. Thankfully, you can move tiles at any time, they just suffer a temporary production penalty for being moved.

While it's an RTS (real time strategy) game, it's more like real time staring. You don't directly interact with your troops, only the kingdom tiles although you do get to interact in certain other ways like spells. Some of the spells will truly save your kingdom too, I completely screwed up on one run and entirely ran out of Wheat so I couldn't produce any troops, but I did have a Tornado spell that mopped the floor with the enemies and save my kingdom.

Everything is about your watchful eye, like some sort of Eye of Sauron – only you're just a little bit nicer. You can also pause at any time, which you'll end up making great use of to plan ahead a little on your resources.

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For the kingdom building, you only get a limited selection of tiles to begin with. To get more, you need to progress through the battles to get them as rewards. Which is interesting on how it works with other systems in the game, like prophecies that let you tweak what enemy waves you'll end up getting, so you can choose to fight tougher enemies for better rewards including better buildings, more money, new spells and so on. But there's also a trader where you can spend some of your built-up cash for buildings, resources and other assorted upgrades.

Quite a few ways to enhance your runs to with meta-progression taken from roguelikes. There's a currency you acquire to unlock special buildings to interact with before you start a run, where you can go through upgrades, there's different kings to unlock and each have their own unique buffs and abilities to unlock and more.

What's the actual goal here? To progress through and survive as many waves as possible, to defeat the bosses that come along. You always know what's coming though, thanks to the timeline bar along the top of the screen that tells you exactly what you'll be facing. Easier said than done though and total efficiency is key here. It's a constant tug of war between ensuring you have enough resources (and the correct resources) to build up your army, as you click around your gaze constantly across your little kingdom to tweak your production.

The only problem with it is that there's currently no mid-run save feature, which feels like an absolutely crazy thing to miss, especially in a strategy game like this. Thankfully, the developers have confirmed it's on the way and the update with it is currently in Beta. Once that's actually released for everyone, it will then get a true double thumbs up from me. Still, it's good without it, but will be actually great with it.

The King is Watching is a complete time sink in all of the best ways with a very satisfying gameplay loop, and it's a surprising challenge to be able to beat it. With the game tested on Kubuntu Linux 25.04 it runs perfectly out of the box with Proton 9.0-4.

From the press release: "We’ve had amazing support from fans and the community throughout this journey, and we’re beyond thrilled to share The King is Watching with the world," said Semyon Itmaniuk, Head of the Hypnohead Studio. "Embrace the monarchy, and craft a kingdom from the ground up into the most fearsome of them all. Huzzah!"