These days, FromSoftware is renowned as a leader in the action-RPG space, making waves since 2009’s Demon’s Souls through, at the very least, 2022’s Elden Ring. But before these games, even before Hidetaka Miyazaki took a leadership role in the studio, FromSoftware was known for a very different sort of RPG, a style typified by King’s Field.
Taking a look back at the King’s Field franchise is a fascinating practice in game development research and analysis. Much like the early souls games, King’s Field appealed to something of a niche audience: while some entries achieved a semblance of mainstream popularity, the franchise as a whole was rejected by many gamers due to its slow, obtuse, and brutally difficult gameplay. What’s interesting about these criticisms, however, is how similar they are to criticisms of FromSoftware’s more recent work: King’s Field was deemed too hard and too impenetrable by many. However, its moody atmosphere, uncompromising grimdark story, and layered, open-ended gameplay laid the groundwork for what FromSoft would go on to accomplish with Demon’s Souls and its successors, making King’s Field a historically significant series, if not a particularly well-aged one. Sadly, FromSoftware seems to have no intentions of reviving King’s Field or its spin-offs. This is where Steam‘s indie scene comes into play.
Labyrinth of the Demon King Is a Great Homage to King’s Field’s Unnerving Story andTough Gameplay
Labyrinth of the Demon King Has King’s Field’s Special Sauce, Modernized
The King’s Field games, much like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, are horror-tinged without being full-blown horror experiences. Players move through creepy areas and fight oh-so-spooky skeletons, and the aforementioned atmosphere is certainly unsettling, but it’s not exactly frightful, per se. Labyrinth of the Demon King maintains this atmospheric heft of King’s Field, but with the fear factor turned up several notches.
Labyrinth of the Demon King takes place during the latter stages of Dharma, an apocalyptic period in Japanese folklore that’s similar to Ragnarok in Norse mythology and the Kali Yuga in Hinduism. Characterized by death, decay, and an influx of Yokai (Japanese demons), Dharma provides the backdrop for all manner of fleshy, bizarre, and terrifying beings. More than that, Labyrinth of the Demon King‘s depiction of this apocalypse is psychologically distressing, being inherently hopeless and dreadful.
Players fill the role of a foot soldier whose leader has been tricked by a malevolent spirit called the Demon King. As a result, the leader and his party are besieged by Yokai, and all of them die except for the protagonist. Honor-bound, the hero embarks on a quest to avenge his leader, entering the titular Labyrinth of the Demon King. As a mere infantryman, the protagonist is severely underpowered and outmatched, which helps the game capture King’s Field‘s signature difficulty and terror.
The game is greatly elevated by its clear visual homages to King’s Field: it is first-person and slow-moving, with intentionally cumbersome combat and chunky, dithered visuals reminiscent of the PlayStation 1. But while the aesthetics of PS1-era horror games were often only incidentally scary, Labyrinth of the Demon King uses them, in conjunction with smoother animations and a more cinematic presentation, to create true and lasting terror. Coupled with its nihilistic, existential narrative, Labyrinth of the Demon King is a worthy successor to King’s Field, at least from a narrative and tonal perspective.
Lunacid Channels the High Adventure and Mystery of King’s Field
If scares and existential dread aren’t quite your cup of tea, but you still want to experience a modern take on the King’s Field experience, Lunacid might be more your speed. It’s not goofy or cartoonish, but rather more fantastical and explicitly high-fantasy—it’s not as grimdark as Labyrinth of the Demon King, that’s for sure.
Still, it’s a brooding, apocalyptic tale that thrusts players into a glorious and occasionally beautiful hellscape. A “Great Beast” has risen from the depths of the ocean and has covered the earth in a poisonous fog, taking countless lives and blocking light from the world. The player-character begins their journey in the depths of the Great Well, a deep, mysterious pit where “undesirables” have been cast. Players must descend deeper into the Great Well in search of the Old One, in the hopes of salvation.
Lunacid developer KIRA LLC, previously best-known for Lost in Vivo, has explicitly named King’s Field as a direct inspiration, as if that were ever in question. The game clearly takes notes from FromSoft’s long-lost classic, but with myriad modern touches that enhance its first-person ARPG gameplay. Combat and exploration are still slow and methodical, but Lunacid‘s class system, bevy of unique weapons, and choice-based narrative structure bring it more in line with what RPG fans have come to expect from the genre. Lunacid also addresses a chief criticism of King‘s Field through its environmental design: Lunacid‘s levels are rich, varied, and colorful, in contrast to King’s Field‘s often claustrophic, colorless, monotonous locales.
Lunacid has also been kindly regarded by players, currently holding a rating of 90% Very Positive on Steam.
It’s hard to say whether FromSoftware will ever revisit King Field in the future, though the prospect seems unlikely. It would appear that the developer views its current soulslike design philosophy as a natural evolution of the King’s Field design framework; FromSoft probably doesn’t want to turn back the clock. Thankfully, ambitious indies like the above are here to carry the torch.
