Your Royal Gayness

Your Royal gayness is part Arabian Nights, part The Crown, a bit visual novel, a dash of resource management, and a pinch of kingdom builder-simulator. It's also a tongue-in-cheek parody on traditional fairy tales, and a fun take on simulation games from developer and publisher Lizard Hazard Games, revolving around helping Prince Amir manage the kingdom while his parents are away. This is done in several phases.

In the Audience phase of the game you have to listen to the complaints and troubles of your people, and try to help them as best you can. If a mysterious portal is dumping goats by the hundreds on a farm, what do you do? What about if strange noises are coming from the sewers. Who do you send to investigate? On top of that, grandmothers are getting eaten by wolves all willy-nilly; the dragons are too fat to join the parade; and the neighbouring vampire nation has infested your castle with vampire bats so that they have leverage when negotiating the price of the sunscreen you export to them. Poor Amir, not even old enough to drink (but old enough to get married), and here he is, having to deal with all these problems. How you choose to resolve these problems for him is important, and will affect what happens later in the game.

In the Management phase, you can task your advisers with different jobs and missions. Maybe you send them out to improve relations with neighbouring nations? Maybe you want them to spy, or gather soldiers for your army or make the people more happy and loyal? Your advisers can do a lot of different things, but beware; these things take time, and you only have a certain amount of days to accomplish everything you want to. You see, Amir has a secret agenda, some changes he wants to make while his parents are gone. But more on that later.

In the Event phase, you guessed it, special events and occurrences take place. Someone may be arranging a ball, for instance, or inviting you to a wedding, or even holding their mining operation too close to a flock of sacred deer. Who knows? Again, your decisions and answers here will affect the game in the long run, so it's worth considering these carefully.

In the last phase, which appears "randomly" (not really), you have to reject a horde of princesses who want to marry you without hurting their feelings, creating animosity between your two nations, or, most importantly, arousing any suspicion. This is all because Amir doesn't want to marry a princess, but instead wants to marry a prince. Unfortunately for Amir, being gay and gay marriages are illegal and forbidden in the fictional nation of Al-Marahij, and now you might have guessed what Amir's secret agenda is. Yes, the goal of the game is really abolishing discriminatory laws against homosexuality, legalising gay marriage, and living happily ever after.

And this is where the phases come in. Everything you do in these phases increases (or decreases) four different stats: Money, Army, Loyalty and Happiness. To reach your ultimate goal you have to use all the loyalty you gather up to get rid of old laws and put some new ones in place. There are four areas where you can make some amendments and change some laws - Finance, Social, National Security, and Equality - and each of these areas affect your stats in different ways, so pay attention to which laws you're passing.

If you're worried the system is too complex, don't be. It isn't. It just looks that way at first glance, but mechanically speaking, it's pretty simple and shallow. It seemed a little arbitrary to us what decisions affected which stats, and usually we got no indication that the decisions we made affected anything at all, that is until we suddenly found ourselves with a very happy population, but no money in the back.

So the game isn't really about resource management, although it takes up a lot of the space in the game (kinda like it has in this review). Instead, it's more about the plot, what happens in between the phases, and about the questions of equality and discrimination that the game addresses in its own quirky little way. Not only is the main character gay, but one of the advisers is genderqueer, the other is a badass warrior woman, and the third is a lizard-wizard. In addition, most of the other characters are women of all shapes, sizes, and skin colours, which is a breath of fresh air. Yes please to more LGBTQ-characters in games! Yes please to more diversity!

It is a crying shame then, that the story they're telling, and they way they tell it (via a lot of text and not a lot of voice acting), is so boring. And that's a cardinal sin in games like these. Clumsy gameplay, but an interesting story? Great! Ugly design, but great characters and dialogue? No problemo! Is the game held together mostly with charm and nostalgia? Even that we can live with. But a boring game? That's where we draw the line.

We really tried to get invested in this game, we really did, but the very first law we passed made being gay legal, and then the story lost a lot of its tension and drive. And when it didn't affect the way Amir related to the world and those around him, or vice versa, we kinda lost interest. We no longer saw a reason to endure the clumsy and unnatural dialogue, and the game's charming visuals and attempts at humour weren't enough to cover up how repetitive and predictable we found the game to be. So when the game crashed for the third time that session (a bug that has reportedly been fixed in the newest patch of the game) we just turned it off, and never turned it back on again, only making it to day 30 of 60. Maybe it's just not our cup of tea, as plenty of people seem to be enjoying it, and we really wanted to enjoy it too... we just didn't.