Your Royal Gayness

I almost skipped right past Your Royal Gayness. I assumed that a game that puts gayness in the title was just going to be so painfully gay that there wouldn't be room for anything else. But I clicked on it anyway, just to see how bad it might be. Cute graphics, that's nice. Then I read the premise. You're a gay prince in a kingdom that doesn't tolerate homosexuality. Can you find love with the other princes, without giving away your secret? All the while, fending off the advances of princesses of neighbouring kingdoms, and the pressures of courtly life that expect marriage and children.

I thought, yeah, okay, that's actually a pretty good idea for a video game. I put it on my wishlist and picked it up during one of the Steam sales, and eventually got around to playing it. To be honest, it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. I thought it would be more of a dating simulator, but it was more like a kingdom management game, similar to Long Live the Queen (though without all the dying). You basically have 4 resources, Wealth, Military, Influence, and Popularity, and you have to make decisions brought to you that will affect your resources.

Now, this game does a lot of things wrong. It had a lot of ideas that don't seem to really go anywhere. For example, there's a dungeon you can visit, but it is almost completely useless. You also have a statistics screen with four variables, and you pick activities on the weekend to raise your stats. But the stats don't seem to actually do anything. Also I ran into a pretty bad bug where the game sort of crashed when doing one quest, you had to click “ignore” on a bunch of error messages to get through it, and you miss out on a bunch of conversation.

NEVERTHELESS, I really liked this game. It has a lot of heart. I got choked up several times,

reading letters from grateful citizens, after I passed a law allowing gay marriage. Also, it's just quite cute and charming. One thing I enjoyed was that if you act too gay, the establishment kidnaps you and submits you to a trial involving a game where you must guess all the straight options i.e. pick the avocado, not the cucumber. So, despite it's flaws, I think it's a fun game. I give it 3/5 stars, grab it on sale though, because I'm not sure about the $15 price tag.