Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a beautiful and bubbly boys’ day

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 continues the story of Henry of Skalitz, 15th century Bohemian blacksmith son and chivalrous Laddy Lad, who seeks to recover his murdered father’s sword from some absolute piece of crap of a noble. The prologue starts you off as the beautifully outfitted and fully leveled bodyguard of Sir Hans Capon – an annoying gadabout and your bosom buddy from the 2018 game. You are on your way to deliver a message to a distant lord in hopes that he will take your own lord’s side in the ongoing civil war. But Plot intervenes in the form of some suspiciously familiar bandits who slaughter your entourage and reduce Henry and Sir Hans to a pair of shirtless renegades.

In the process, Henry gets shot full of arrows and loses all his progression points along with his endgame armor and weapons as he goes through a series of embedded, narrativized tutorials and wild flashbacks that fill you in on the events of the original Deliverance. A few hours later, he wakes up on a bed that isn’t his, crusty with blood and dirt. It’s very much the first 24 hours of the stereotypical British hen party. All it’s missing is a tattoo somewhere awkward and a traffic cone full of sick people.

Watch on YouTube

Things continue to go sideways – at least as far as my savegame is concerned. Henry and Sir Hans go to a castle on a hilltop, but are not allowed to enter because no one recognizes Sir Hans when he is dressed in burlap lifted from a corpse. Then they get locked up in the warehouses after Sir Hans strikes a pub – again, because no one recognizes Sir Hans when he looks like a hay bale rolled through a manhole. The stag party energy is definitely wearing thin at this point. It suggests the more grown-up sort of British stag does when everyone secretly hates being there but feels they have to uphold standards. Waheeey, bois, amirite? Wow! Ah, I remember this bar. It used to be a Woolworths and you could get a double Milky Bar for 30p. Comrades, my dear brothers, I actually feel a little sad. Can’t we just go back to Airbnb and watch Friends?

Finally, Henry and Sir Hans have a massive tiff about Sir Hans’ tendency to beat up people who fail to acknowledge his point of view, prompting Sir Hans to storm off like the insufferable blue-blooded loser he surely is. Henry is left standing by the stocks on a bright summer morning, penniless and triumphantly championless – and it’s finally time for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to begin. How will you rise from this dire predicament? What Kind of Henry Will You Be? A wandering thief? A silver-tongued scholar? A skilled swordsman? A good Christian? A female gambler? An unpredictable pimple in a clown’s slippers?

The answer is probably all of these and more, depending on the situation or task. Deliverance 2 is once again a free-form open-world historical RPG that teems with systems and practices social mobility like few others, though you’re fundamentally dependent on your upgradable character stats. Among its new features is the ability to switch between three clothing fills at will. This is the basis, I hope, for such chameleonic shenanigans as kicking guards while draped in sackcloth, then transforming into full plate armor like Superman emerging from a phone booth.

But right now, after five hours of play, my Henry is a homely and peaceful flower picker. He and I have long since forgotten how to reconcile with Sir Hans, let alone avenge Henry’s father. We stroll together through the undergrowth of the “Bohemian Paradise” region, running our eyes over festive roots and following the giggle of water to the glitter of hidden streams. We grope for clumps of gorse and belladonna amid dreamy spokes of forest candles, and identify plants by stem, leaf shape and color based on a lovingly illustrated herbarium.

We pause, now and then, to wonder whether we should experiment with eating an herb to find out its properties, or seek the opinion of an apothecary. Ah, but that would mean going into town, which might mean meeting that of Sir Hans again, and that’s how nice under the canopy, amirites? So soothing. Henry occasionally gets whipped, but as luck would have it, there are lots of cabbage fields on the edge of this very forest. There’s also the occasional bandit that instantly murders us – as in the original game, wearing the right combinations of armor really counts, and a difference in gear quality is audible in the blade from the blade on the plate. But hostiles are easily evaded when you’re already roaming the undergrowth: just look for the investigating rabbit icon at the top of the HUD.

Deliverance 2’s interface design is generally quite restrained and elegant. The menus are perhaps a bit substantial: they’re rendered in shards of soft leather, decorative calligraphy and woodwork, and the insistence on materiality also forces the developers (apparently) to simulate friction by mixing bits of fabric and wood around. The map screen is a painted wart table hung with starchy paper clouds, and the codex beetles offer tidbits about the Middle Ages.

There are some familiar HUD fixtures in the form of a horizontal compass with quest waypoints, along with an indispensable attitude indicator around your marker during combat. As in the first game, you’ll need to angle your weapon to intercept attacks, and learning to read the NPC animations below the iconography takes practice. But the game is careful not to overwrite its own geography to the point that the geography feels cosmetic. You have to crouch close to the ground to trigger the pop-up for, say, a gathering herb, which means you have to recognize it first.

Sir Hans and his antics aside, sticking to the woods like this means I’m avoiding the details of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s period setting, though I guess my expanding taxonomy of herbs is consistent with Andreas Inderwildi’s analysis of the 2018- the game’s representation. politics. My random foraging is no doubt part of what Andreas called a tendency to see history as “an accumulation of facts,” both comparable to and actively performed by the accumulation of gear and loot in an Elder Scrolls-style RPG.

As he continues in that piece, the “realist” idea of ​​history as a puzzle to be solved, a lost entity to be accounted for, does not really provide a reliable measure of a medieval ‘world’ consisting of scattered and hollowed out documents, competing perspectives and accidental or deliberate misinformation. In fact, the quantitative bookishness of such a historical recreation can only hide or sanitize the choices included in e.g. the presentation of other ethnicities as murderous attackers.

I’m far too early in my Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 career to offer any sort of comprehensive assessment here. My Henry doesn’t even have shoes right now. He hasn’t showered since the bandit attack, which is another reason why he doesn’t go into villages much – like in the original game, you can wash your face and clothes at the horse trough, but if you want to impress someone halfway noble and pass the associated conversation skill checks, you’ll want to be suitably perfumed. But so far, Deliverance 2’s ideas about history as a practice and 15th century Bohemia feel specifically in line with the first game.

In particular, it settles happily into the concept of a medieval society where women are ornaments, spectators, forgiving confidants and objects of desire. The first time you see a woman in the world of Deliverance 2, beyond the intro, is as part of an Ovidian stealth tutorial where you and Hans sneak up on some bathers. The first female character you have an actual conversation with is a healer; the other is the healer’s daughter, who promptly steps into the role of Henry’s bedside therapist.

I don’t think that’s all there is to Deliverance 2’s depictions of women – I’ve had some relatively non-lesbian chats with at least three, one of them admittedly a brothel owner – but the framework we’re working with here is very much Boys Will Be Boys and Oh You (Hands On Hips). I am interested to find out if this will change. Deliverance 2’s opening is dominated by the chemistry between Henry and Sir Hans, with Sir Hans acting as the unapologetic jerk who both enables Henry’s badassery and makes you feel better because you’re not to bad. But there are traces of something more engaging there.

In the first game, Henry’s relatively humble birth was a central plot theme, in ways familiar from many medieval romance fictions. This continues in Deliverance 2: Stag Party energy aside, the opening bust with Sir Hans is a playable commentary on how dress and looks are more important than the color of your blood.

At one point, Sir Hans grandly outlines the divinely ordained distinction between peasants, nobility, and clergy, only to stumble over the question of which category Henry exactly belongs to. Maybe it’s just the usual ludonarrative dissonance at play, but I like the idea of ​​a historical fable that’s about figuring out the class associations of a character who is “classless” in the RPG sense, and who is able to shift between roles as the occasion demands.

With Sir Hans out of the picture, I might reinvent Henry as some kind of insufferable early proto-feminist. Of course, that will mean I have to stop poisoning him with random forest mushrooms, but I’m willing to make that sacrifice. Anyway, stay tuned for my full review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in a handful of weeks.