// PC GAMER — GAMING
Queen's Domain might be the best game like Metroid Prime since Metroid Prime
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I tried the demo for Queen's Domain last year and liked it a lot—though it definitely had some friction I wasn't sure about. The full game launched on October 30, and I eagerly rushed through the parts I'd already played in the demo.
Turns out, that demo cut out right when things were about to go nuts.
Five hours in out of an estimated 30+, and Queen's Domain is easily one of my top games of the year. I am only begrudgingly writing this, because I'd rather be playing right now.
Queen's Domain starts out resembling other entries in a growing subgenre of indie King's Field-likes, paying homage to the first-person dark fantasy RPG series FromSoftware put out before its soulsward turn. In its first half hour or so, Queen's Domain distinguishes itself similarly to fellow genre standout Lunacid: Fantastic art, maybe even better music, and a mastery of nostalgic intangibles (menu, UI, sound cues, etc.) After beating the first boss, Queen's Domain rewards you with a magic airdash sword, and it's at that point that the game truly begins.
Queen's Domain is a very deliberately paced game and, like a lot of first-person RPGs, it starts out feeling like your boots will always be on the ground. Think the difference between Doom and Quake: You can mostly tell when a game will let you get some air or not.
But once I was rocking the Holy Sword, Endu? Holy shit. Queen's Domain's first area opens up like some wonderful clockwork contraption. A lot of the verticality reminds me of Destiny raids, the way hidden paths blend into the environment, and reaching them feels like you're sequence breaking.
Endu can be upgraded with special gems throughout the game, with each giving you an extra dash while airborne. I'm up to three at the time of writing, and each upgrade has felt like it radically opened up my traversal options: There are parts of the first few maps I'm pretty sure I'll only be able to reach once I'm up to four or five dashes, zooming from one end of the map to the other without touching the ground.
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Endu's a standout, but it's not the only tool available: Queen's Domain seems to have an expansive arsenal, and weapons can transform as they're upgraded. You upgrade weapons just by using them, and the game has no stat allocation on level up, encouraging experimentation with the arsenal—PC Gamer hardware writer James Bentley managed to max upgrade 20 weapons across his full playthrough. You can effectively create a "build" via your choice of which weapons to hotkey (limit of three) and upgrade, a system that more resembles BioShock or the System Shock Remake rather than something like Dark Souls or Lunacid.