Crowns And Pawns: Completed

Here's a rare event. I finished a game! Yes, I know. Doesn't happen very often, does it? And even more unicornly, it's a game I wishlisted after playing the demo in a Next Fest. And then I bought it. And now I've played it. Seriously. What are the chances?

The game is  

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit   

Inevitably, it's a point and click adventure, very much in the classic style. The demo reminded me strongly of the Broken Sword series, which I consider to be the gold standard for the genre. I'm always on the lookout for games that follow closely in that tradition, which is why I wishlisted it. 

The weird thing, though, is that when I reviewed the demo back in February of '22, I wasn't all that enthusiastic. In my summing-up, I described it as "...quite bland... adventure gaming by numbers" and concluded "... if it turned up for free on Amazon Games or Epic or somewhere like that... I'd probably play it.... I'm not sure I'd pay money for it, though."

But I did. I payed £8.49 for it on Christmas Day 2023. I can't remember buying it but given the purchase date I suspect I got a Steam Gift Card or similar for Christmas that year. Don't remember that either. In the same purchase I also bought Tails Noir: Preludes, which I've started but haven't finished. Maybe I'll get back to that one next.

Crowns and Pawns took me just under eight hours to complete, which it works out at about a pound an hour. Looked at objectively, it's not great value. It's cheap enough, sure, but I've played Star Resonance: Blue Protocol for almost exactly as long and it hasn't cost me anything. 

I pick on that one specifically because I was playing it in between sessions of Crowns and Pawns and enjoying it just as much but I could name-check any F2P title, really. Is it any wonder smaller studios struggle to get attention for games when they have to charge money for them and there's so much of equal or higher quality available for free?

But... there are no major Free to Play publishers pumping out endless, throwaway point and click adventures. Not that I know of, anyway, although if there are any, I'd love to hear about them. For the dedicated teams hammering away at all those intractable puzzles and coming up with endless streams of witty one-liners, I guess the main problem would be all those giveaways from Amazon Prime Gaming. Prime seems determined to hoover up every P&C game ever made and hand it out for free to bulk out the ever-decreasing value of their offer.

 

Except, like having a show that goes into syndication back in the golden age of network television, having your five or ten year-old adventure game picked up by Prime or Epic might be the payday the developers were always hoping for. How much do they get, I wonder?

It seems the actual numbers are safely tucked away behind NDAs but this reddit thread, which includes a couple of replies supposedly from developers who've taken the shilling, suggests it's a flat fee upfront with some sort of payment for new accounts registered (In the case of Epic.). Whatever it is, for most of the aging adventure games I claim, it has to be a bonus. None of them are going to be generating much in the way of new sales by now.

So, was Crowns and Pawns any good? Yes, it was, thank-you for asking. 

I didn't like the opening, which had nothing much to do with the rest of the game. I can see why they didn't use it for the demo. If they had, I'd never have wishlisted it, let alone bought it. I disliked it so much, I stopped playing after I finished it and didn't pick the game up again for more than a year.

I suppose out of politeness I should insert a spoiler warning here. Like anyone cares...

The game begins with that peculiar "Prologue" set in Chicago, in which Milda, the protagonist, and her friend and roomate Dana, meet some annoying jerk about some job Dana is trying to get. There's a whole lot of infuriating business where you have to stop a busker from playing, get some guy a drink, print out fliers and pack your bags, none of which I found remotely amusing or entertaining and all of which seemed to take fucking forever.

Having played the whole thing now, I can see it's supposed to be giving you some backstory to Milda and Dana's relationship, setting her friend up to be a useful contact later in the game, but why it all needs to be presented in such a tedious fashion beats me. It feels like a different game altogether and a much less enjoyable one.

Once you get past that, though, the remaining 90% of the game is pure adventure. Milda arrives at her dead grandfather's cottage in Lithuania (Big spoiler - he's not really dead!), all of which you can read about in that demo review I linked earlier because the demo is pretty much that whole chapter.

From there the action moves to the capital, Vilnius, then to Belarus (To fix the result of an ice-hockey game.) and then to Siena in Italy. All with trips back to Vilnius in between. You get to see a lot of Europe, some views of which, particularly the many churches you have to break into along the way, look to have been taken directly from life. 

There's a lot of business with seals (The kind you use to put wax on documents, not the ones that honk horns in the circus - if you live in the 19th century.), codes, invisible ink, secret compartments... all the good stuff you expect from the genre. You have to read old books and look at old pictures and compare this with that and come to conclusions.

All of which requires a considerably more robust and coherent UI than the one you're given. I ended up using a walk-through quite a bit. I almost always knew what to do, I just couldn't figure out how to make the game do it. Often the way with these things, I find.

Some of the mechanics seem to get forgotten along the way, like the notes function on Milda's phone, which you sometimes use to combine facts you've discovered so as to learn something new but which mostly just seems to sit there, doing nothing. Or maybe I missed a bunch of stuff. That's always possible.

If so, it wasn't anything that got in the way of finishing the story, which ends in ludicrously dramatic fashion with a seismic collapse in a cave beneath the vaults of a church in Vilnius. The game begins like an episode of a failed sitcom starring two wacky girls just out of college and ends like the climax of an Indiana Jones movie. It's a bit of a leap.

One thing I did like about the ending is that you get the choice of grabbing the eponymous, extremely valuable and possibly magical but also allegedly cursed crown or letting it fall into the abyss, to be forever lost. I chose to let it go, which gave me an achievement only 17% of players have got, so I'm guessing greed wins out for most people there. Or possibly megalomania. 

The whole plot feels far from convincing throughout. There's something about KGB psychotronic experiments and a history professor who wants to rule the world using telepathy. There's a hint of magic that could just be an over-active imagination and an awful lot of quite detailed historical information concerning the Baltic States. Religion comes into things a lot and so does architecture, not to mention the rules of ice-hockey. It's all quite educational.

Mostly the puzzles are logical and realistic - for the genre. There are a couple of annoying "action" sequences involving precise timing that I could have done without. Also, if you're going to require a librarian to go to the far end of a library to retrieve a book so Milda can do something while she's away, I'd suggest not making that book the Necronomicon. That was one I had to use the walk-through for because I assumed it was a joke. 

Speaking of jokes, they're pretty good, on the whole. I wasn't rolling around but I did chuckle a few times. Milda and Dana have several good exchanges and Milda's friend Joris, at whose apartment in Vilnius she stays (Nothing happens between them, or not in my play-through it didn't, anyway.) has a droll sense of humor.

Altogether, I had a good time playing Crowns and Pawns. I've played plenty of worse adventure games. It's strengths are the graphics, which are very pleasing throughout, the characters, who are all either likeable or boo-hiss as appropriate and the setting, which is original.  

The mechanics are mostly very sound. Using items from inventory and combining them is intuitive and straightforward. Most things work as you'd expect. Movement is mostly walking slowly but you can double-click to move instantly from location to location including, within scenes, from door to door, which is very welcome.It's just a few of the more elaborate options that don't feel as polished as they could be. 

One innovation I can't recall seeing in a point&click game before is the option to change Milda's appearance, just as you would in an RPG. They could have made a bit more of that, I thought. If the game tells you about it, I missed it. I only discovered it by accident when I noticed Milda had left her travel bag by the sofa in Joris's flat.

I clicked on it out of curiosity and it opened a window where I was able to change her clothes, style her hair and add accessories. As far as I could tell, what she wore didn't make any difference (Except the one time she had to make herself a fake hockey fan shirt so the driver would let her on the bus.) but as you can tell from the pictures, I made good use of the option anyway.

I also notice now that two of the slots, bracelets and earrings, are empty. That suggests I must have missed something along the way. I don't think I care enough to go back and look for whatever it was I missed. 

The game has a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam and I think that's fair. I feel mostly positive about it too. Would I recommend it, though? 

Well, for a Point&Click fan, yes I would. It does more than enough right to keep the craving at bay for a few hours. For the casual player, though, probably not. There are a lot of similar but better options out there. And quite a few of them are free. Or will be if you wait long enough.