Spirits mode turns player creation into a poker game, and it is the fastest way to build an elite prospect. Which hands to chase, when to Double Up, and the point totals you need for a top rated player.
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Developer: Hypnohead. Publisher: tinyBuild. Platform: Steam and PC. Score: 4 out of 5.
My name is Joel, and I have poured more hours than I care to admit into The King is Watching, and it has quietly started to haunt my day to day life.
When you catch yourself in the shower plotting your next move, you know a game has hooked you deep. Released in 2025 by developer Hypnohead and publisher tinyBuild, it went from unknown to surprise hit almost overnight, a top five launch on Steam with a rare ninety percent positive rating.
After a handful of runs, it is very easy to see why.
Before anything else, let me tell you what this game does not do. No loot boxes. No artificial timers. No daily chores or battle passes nagging you to log back in. Just pure, tense runs and a kingdom daring you to blink.
From the very title screen you feel like a monarch with real weight, because your literal gaze shapes everything. This is a roguelite city builder, but you are not gathering wood and stone so much as focusing your all seeing eye across a small castle grid.
Want your farms to flourish? Better watch them. Need the military to train up? Stare them down. And wherever you are not looking, well, let us just say your subjects are world class at slacking off the second the King glances away.
It is a brilliant, simple twist. Your attention is the resource, and there is never quite enough of it to go around.
What starts as a simple loop grows with remarkable depth.
On any given run I would be split between maximizing lumber and shoring up my army, and then, without warning, a random event scrambles the whole board. Plagues, golden ages, droughts, cult uprisings.
Every run rewrites the script, and I lost count of the times my flawless plan collapsed because I took my eye off one vulnerable corner for a few seconds too long.
But here is the clever part, and it is where the game truly shines. You learn and you adapt. The disasters, whether it is starved granaries or a border raid, turn into next run wisdom.
Each crisis is not just a roadblock, it is a teaching moment for the next campaign. Lose your northern border to invaders? That is now lesson one on your checklist, watch the army.
Get too comfortable after a long stretch of peace and get gutted by cultists? That is simply par for the course in this kingdom, and you will remember it next time. That loop of dying, learning, and pushing a little further is the entire hook, and it is a genuinely great one.
For all it does right, the game is not flawless.
The interface, for example, could use a coat of polish, especially when you are juggling several regions at once and trying to track what needs your gaze.
And the troops occasionally decide to take a scenic detour instead of getting on with the ass whooping you sent them to deliver. The pathfinding can be a touch too relaxed for its own good.
But honestly, these are minor hiccups in a game that stays fresh and tense run after run. The developer has also promised regular updates and improvements, which only adds to the excitement, and none of it dulled the pull of just one more run.
So who should play this?
If you want a strategy game that demands both careful planning and quick improvisation, and you crave that instant, addictive pull of one more run, The King is Watching is absolutely for you.
If you would rather have a relaxed builder you can zone out with while things tick along on their own, this is the opposite of that.
It wants your full attention, always, by design. But that tension is exactly the point, and exactly why it works.
The King is Watching is brilliantly tough, sneakily addictive, and fully liable to keep you playing until you notice dawn creeping through the window.
It takes one clever idea, that your gaze is the only thing making your kingdom run, and builds a gripping, endlessly replayable roguelite around it. A few rough edges keep it from perfection, but they never once got in the way of the fun.
Score: 4 out of 5.
Related: Want more like this? See our roundup of the best roguelites on Steam right now.
Spirits mode turns player creation into a poker game, and it is the fastest way to build an elite prospect. Which hands to chase, when to Double Up, and the point totals you need for a top rated player.
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