Play This City-Management Roguelike While Your Boss Isn’t Looking
There’s a seed of truth about The King is Watching. It suggests that people only work when a boss is watching. When you’ve got the Sauron’s Eye of a middle-manager watching you, you’re far more likely to be working hard. If they’re not watching, you’re more likely to kick back and watch Netflix. Come to think of it, The King is Watching could be seen as anti-remote working propaganda.
This idea of ‘work when you’re watched’ is cunningly applied to The King is Watching: a city management sim. You have a basic city, housed in a series of squares on the left-hand side of your screen. But their default state is to do absolutely nothing. Sod all. They would merrily let invaders ransack and pillage their city, rather than lift a finger to help.
A Great Eye, Lidless, Wreathed in Flame
What you have to remedy this is a gaze. This gaze can be moved to your choice of squares in the city – it starts as an L-shaped three-block in the opening moments of the game – and any buildings within the gaze begin to function. Forests get cut down; farms are tended; barracks supply troops. In a tiny corner of your city, under your gaze, people actually do what they’re supposed to. You begin to daydream of what the city might be like if it automated itself.
As with any city-builder, there is an upward ramp. You start with a well, and that well generates enough water to place forests and farmland. With those in focus, pumping out resources, you can begin to think about troops, which is appropriate as – Tower Defence-style – waves of enemies approach across a time-based ticker. You can watch an impending goblin horde and frantically move your gaze to build up some skeletons or madmen to defend the base.
While combat is automated, the rewards generally are not. You can pick from your rewards – ooh, a new military building; ah a new resource square – and then apply them to your city, moving your focus to ensure they’re contributing.
Hundreds of Choices to Make Every Minute
Then it’s on to the micro-objectives: are you planning to gather enough gold to increase the size of your gaze? That seems worthwhile, as a three-square gaze doesn’t exactly fill the coffers. But you might equally be interested in gaining lumber to increase the army cap (you’re limited to the number of units at one time), researching new building types, or simply recharging your defences. When you’ve got a few seconds before another attack and only three or four squares to gaze at, the choices become frantic. More than once, I’ve been cycling through gaze orientations, panic on my face. I constantly gaze at mushrooms and hydras, expecting them to supply me with troops, but I’m at my unit-cap. The King is Watching seems to invite my stupidity.
With the micro-objectives out of the way, it’s then onto the macro. And this is what The King is Watching does so disgustingly well. The King is Watching is a roguelike (I know, I know, we have too many of those) and each run is broken into stages. Complete a stage and you get to determine the make-up of the next one, at least in terms of enemy troops. The more enemies you invite, the more rewards you gain, and it is unutterably tempting to invite all of them. I’ve crashed onto the rocks of my own hubris more than once, simply because I wanted as much currency for the shop as I possibly could.
Preparation is King
Bosses trundle in on occasion, and they take absolutely everything you have got. You need to have gathered spells for these occasions (oh yeah, there are spells, all unlocked as rewards – if you defeat the enemies to unlock them of course), and you will want your King’s actions to be off cooldown (oh, did we mention that there are different kings to play, each with different playstyles and actions that you can trigger?) so that you can bombard them. But even then it might not be enough. To finish a run, you will need to have mastered the ramp well enough that you have a few top-tier units and some support buildings constantly in your gaze. A couple of hospitals and a training ground will probably do it.
Zoom out and there’s even more. If you finish a run you gain the delicious green-coin currency that allows you to unlock things. It’s a painful experience of picking the thing that you want the most, even though there are about twenty things you want the most. You can unlock new kings who might prioritise buildings or troops. There are Advisors, and additional sockets for more Advisors, and they are all handy for a multitude of builds. You can score some starting resources, some square-multipliers, or you can add to the deck of rewards that the game pulls from. It never seems to end.
And then there’s progress. As you beat levels, you can increase the difficulty for more long-term rewards. Risk is always on a seesaw against reward, and you’re judging just how much you can handle in a given moment. The King is Watching on Xbox also comes packed with the Volcano biome, which is an absolute bonus since it brings a whole new currency that allows you to deal in demonic or necromantic beings. It’s fab.
If You Have a Strategic Bone in Your Body, Pick This Up
You can probably sense some of my enthusiasm about The King is Watching. It is – by some distance – my most played and most adored game on the PC from last year. I have shouted about this game from rooftops for months, and now I can tell all my Xbox chums about it too. Lovely.
What do I love so much about it? For one, it’s got such a sadistic bent. There are so many benefits dangling in front of you as you play The King is Watching, but they always come at a cost. For two, it may look like it’s giving you precious little control – you only have three buildings working for you at a given time, after all – but the number of strategies, builds and approaches are absolutely mind-boggling. I am over 100 hours in The King is Watching, and I am still finding new ways to win and lose. Sometimes, I will aim for a new unit that I have never truly built a city around before. Often, I will wonder why I never tried it before. I will sweep all the enemies in front of me, and add the unit to the list of builds that I will try again.
But mostly The King is Watching is just impossibly clever. There are so many deft touches that make it stand out. I love the way that you construct your own waves of enemies. I adore the way each King is so wildly different from another – this one generates free troops!; this one materialises resources out of nothing! – and while they always, without fail, seem overpowered, they will have a weakness that will mean you get overwhelmed if you’re not careful. I love that the Advisors all offer amazing unlocks, but it’s only when they synergise together that they become stratospheric.
Have You Got a Mouse in the House?
What do I not love? Alas, The King is Watching is not made for console. It hurts me to say it: I have been watching the impending launch date, getting increasingly excited about the release, but it arrives flawed. There are just so many different layers of The King is Watching: the city, the battlefield, the spells, actions, resource-management and incoming waves. All of them need your attention, and that means a tabbing structure with the shoulder buttons. But it’s hard to learn, easy to get confused, and ultimately slow. Plus please, PLEASE turn tooltips off as default: moving to any building or troop causes a sodding great interface to cover the screen, and it’s never beneficial to a mid- to high-level player.
I wish I could be recommending The King is Watching without that caveat. But it IS clumsy with a pad in hand. If you have the ability to play with a mouse, we’d eagerly nod our head. It’s just acres more accessible that way.
The King is Watching was my PC game of 2025, and there’s every chance it will be my game of 2026 too. It’s a city-management sim where the city actively works against you. It’s a roguelike where every benefit comes with a retaliatory punch to the gut. It’s a tower defence where you mostly watch and hope that the towers do their job. It’s cruel, frantic and so impossibly clever. It makes me feel a little inadequate about my own game ideas.
Sure, The King is Watching has some control quibbles on console (get a mouse, peon), but I’m the King, so I am allowed to brand it with the score that I want. And that score is a 5.
Important Links
The King is Watching – And He Deserves Your Full Attention – https://www.thexboxhub.com/the-king-is-watching-and-he-deserves-your-full-attention/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/the-king-is-watching/9n24fwhr3v72
