Too meta for its own good – Reigns: Her Majesty Review

This game is fun but misses the mark on a few things - mainly on the pacing of the player experience and on the evolution of the story. The game can be very funny and is at its best when it’s not trying to be cryptic. I just wanted to play the game where I am the queen and am put in interesting situations, but the game kept getting in its own way. When it started getting all meta it lost me. In addition, I wonder how much playtesting was actually done, as I found myself several times in situations that felt like dead ends (they had low probability and/or cryptic solutions). The emphasis seems to have been put in the narrative, at the expense of the actual game/puzzle design, leading to far too many situations where I felt like I was making no progress at all. There is a “fail safe” mechanic that in theory allows you to manipulate your play through to achieve a higher chance of specific events occurring but it is tedious, hard and sloppy to use. I would say the devs missed the mark on making a better Reigns, so I recommend you see this as a weird experiment done with the Reigns system, not as Reigns 2.
Review by ElChipoMaldito on Reigns: Her Majesty.