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Quite a few kingdom management games have graced the App Store, but I'm not sure any of them have felt quite as bespoke and personal as Yes, Your Grace. Where many other titles of this ilk tend to employ overlapping systems and procedural generation to create “challenge” and “replayability,” the focus here is on a specific narrative and creating a linear, but multifaceted and twist-laden, experience. The good news is that this gamble pays off quite well. Yes, Your Grace is a remarkably fresh take on kingdom management and it tells a quite entertaining story along the way.

Davern duties

In Yes, Your Grace, you play as King Eryk, the ruler of the modest kingdom of Davern. As the ultimate ruler of the land, your job is mostly to make decisions that have an impact on your subjects while trying to balance a few key resources: funds, supplies, military strength, and contentment.

While this sounds like yet another version of something like Reigns, starting a new game of Yes, Your Grace immediately disperses that notion. After an extremely brief tutorial, players flash back a calendar year to see King Eryk playing hide-and-seek in the royal gardens with his three daughters before being summoned to court, where you begin your career in hearing requests about all manner of things–ranging from requests for loans to hunting down mystical creatures–in an effort to try and lead Davern through a particularly tumultuous year.

Designed dilemmas

Beyond having a clearer focus on story (and particularly King Eryk's personal life), Yes, Your Grace also thoughtfully and purposely serves up which requests you will be hearing and what they are instead of using some degree of procedural variability. Every week of every playthrough of this game is predestined to have the same events occur, though the way you address them and your progress toward completing different milestones might shift depending on the decisions you make.

The net effect of this won't be immediately apparent, but it leads to some really impressive narrative developments that may genuinely surprise you (as they did me) and make for a super compelling experience that you can't get from other games that stay more focused on their systems. It also helps that Yes, Your Grace doesn't portray playing a monarch as simply a fun backdrop for its game design. Many moments during play call into question the value of a single anointed ruler and much of the game will put you into dilemmas that force you to make some kind of compromise that you likely wouldn't have otherwise made in order to keep your your people alive. Again, this all happens at specific times, which–in addition to not feeling like randomly timed byproducts of emergent gameplay–all play a role in shaping and pacing the story.

Gracing the small screen

Yes, Your Grace originally released on PC in March of 2020 (oof), and this iOS version feels totally competent. Aside from a few times where exiting a scene by moving to the edge of the screen took a few extra taps for some reason, the game feels right at home on mobile devices. On the App Store, the game is free-to-start, so you can try out how it feels for yourself ahead of potentially spending $4.99 to see it through to the end. I will say the free portion doesn't quite showcase the game's greatest strengths or narrative high points, but it does enough to let you figure out whether you want to see those things or not.

When it comes to games like this, Yes, Your Grace has sold me on the idea of a management game being first-and-foremost a storytelling vehicle. I would much sooner prefer to see games take this approach than see another title pile on mechanics that jumble together into a slurry that you can eventually puzzle your way through. I just hope that potential future games in this vein have the sense not to choose a tonally discordant end credits song, which is one of (very few) sour notes in this game.

The bottom line

There's a decent amount of competition seemingly offering what Yes, Your Grace does, but none of them are structured in the rigid fashion that allows for such a deliberate and intricately shaped story to take place. It's certainly a refreshing take on what can sometimes feel like a stagnant genre, but its novelty is not the only thing going for it. Yes, Your Grace goes out of its way to tell a thrilling and tense story that stays with you after you've found a way to complete it.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/yes-your-grace-review/

Mobile games really don't need to be deep. It's nice when they are (while still respecting the limitations of the platform), but also sometimes you just want a nice thing to do that isn't doomscrolling and provides some decent amount of entertainment value. This is the space that Solquence plays in. There's a little bit to it, but more than that it's a nice meditative experience that can stretch on and on whenever you need a nice little break on your phone.

Match-three of a kind

Solquence is a matching puzzle game that mixes elements of traditional match-three games with Poker. On a rather sizeable grid, you are tasked with placing (mostly) traditional playing cards and trying to form matches based on Poker hands like straights, flushes, pairs, and triples. Matching cards clears them off the board and adds to your score, and you proceed in this fashion until you fill up your entire grid and can't place any more cards.

To add some complexity to this, Solquence has some additional rules around forcing you to only place cards that are adjacent to ones already placed on the board, wild cards, and death cards that get added to the grid if you can't fully clear the board by the time you reach the end of a deck. This makes for a game where you're constantly managing board space while also looking out for opportunities to score big.

Matching marathon

With such a large game board (it's a 7×7 grid), it usually takes a long time before Solquence starts feeling like a challenge. Runs may go hours and score up into the hundreds of thousands while your game screen still looks fairly empty. If you fail to clear the board by the end of a level, you get random penalty cards added to your grid, but all of these are generally pretty easy to manage considering Solquence allows you to clear cards by matching single pairs.

This makes Solquence much less of a highly repeatable challenge and more about seeing just how far you can take its almost meditative gameplay. In my time with it, I rarely looked at my score and was perfectly happy just continuing to make matches, line up a rows of death cards, and wipe them out with opportune draws of the sun card (the only thing that can remove death cards from your board).

Truly solitary

Outside of the game's only real mode, Solquence offers a few different card backs to change up the scenery a little bit and tracks your high scores between runs. It is no fancier than that, though. High scores aren't even tracked on any kind of online leaderboard. It's just a record of your own scores.

While I appreciate this kind of stripped down design, I do think there's enough to Solquence's core that its single mode doesn't quite fully realize the potential that is there. Having some kind of rule customization to modify the challenge or perhaps different board sizes could go a long way in adding some variety, and that's not to mention the omissions of pretty obvious standard features like online leaderboards or a daily challenge.

The bottom line

Solquence offers a clever and meditative puzzle experience that will rarely challenge you. There's something really nice about that, but it's hard not to think about the other ways its gameplay formula could be adjusted to inject a little more excitement into it.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/solquence-review/