Below the Crown

I'll update my review once I've given the game a bit more playtime as I bought this during a humble bundle before it was released. I yet have to find some more time to play the game, but even with limited playtime I'm impressed. Review so far: - The art style is quite unique for a chess based game. - Music is nice and relaxing

Good fun game so far, enjoy the puzzle aspect of the game, looking forward to more updates.

really scratches my into the breach itch but its really damn hard

The concept is a worse game than simply playing Chess.

really fun so far, only gripe is the AI solver is a bit slow at with the rune added

Nice game but it tend to crash on my computer under linux. I hope this will be fixed...

Chess, but it's all endgames. It's everything it says on the deceptively deep box.

misfits attic strike in again... number #50?

When I first played this it had a crash bug on Linux (that also caused entire system crash, apparently just eating all the memory) - good news, a few weeks later, the issue seems to be gone. So now that that's fixed, the game is a lot of fun. The visual kind of cyberpunk style is pleasant. The weird interjections of questions about your mental health are interesting. Nothing to complain about audio-wise. Gameplay-wise I appreciate that it's *not too chess*, while still being *enough* chess that things are familiar and don't need a lot of explanation. I recently played "The Rookery" which is also decent, but one thing I found frustrating there was the requirement to complete a checkmate in a number of moves, which makes it so you still have to "seriously chess" sometimes. As a lazy video gamer I prefer not to have to seriously chess, so Below the Crown fits my preference much better, in that there's no time limit after which you lose (the board shrinks so if you're having a hard time closing it out, taking longer actually helps), and it doesn't even require you to organize a checkmate, you also win if you just capture every other piece. There's also levels with different win conditions, which I appreciate as an enjoyer of variety. The Rookery has a similar "drop new pieces" model, but the difference here of doing it via your wizard-piece's line of sight (vs Rookery is just drop anywhere) gives it just enough extra trickiness to make dropping pieces still feel like part of the tactics. One cruel thing about Below the Crown, which is maybe a down-point versus Rookery, is there is a [limited] undo button, but even if you have spare uses, you can't use it to undo a really bad mistake where the result is your wizard gets captured. So you have to pay extra attention to those sneaky bishops all the way across the board. Anyway, in summary, this game is fun for a person who's okay at chess but doesn't really want to play chess, and is probably also fun for a person who's good at chess but doesn't take it too seriously. I doubt it would be fun for someone who *hates* chess. Edit after playing it some more - there's less story-escalation than I expected, which is a shame. It's more of a "just do the same thing again but with an added difficulty factor," with nothing really new unlocking. e.g. I expected some sort of special boss for unlocking and playing "act 3", but it was just the same knight-king boss level as I've had before in act 2. Would still recommend, but less than I thought.

I really enjoyed it! The gameplay mechanics and style are both very cool! Unlocking new pieces and skills constantly changed my strategies