After a long development journey since its arrival on Kickstarter in 2015, Yes, Your Grace is finally here, smaller than previously proposed, but with its original idea intact – almost a metaphor for my own in-game kingdom after I’ve tried my best to be a good and just king.
You play as Eryk, King of Davern, who each week welcomes petitioners to his halls to listen to their problems and hopefully find a satisfactory resolution. A line of petitioners forms in your throne room, which can include pleas from poor peasants, offers from merchants or requests from your three daughters and your wife. While your family needs you to mediate or put your foot down as head of the household, whether it’s soothing your wife’s worries at the state of things or your teenage girls bickering amongst each other, other petitioners have more practical needs: gold or supplies. A quick glance at your resources, permanently visible at the bottom of the screen, tells you what you have available. Spoiler alert: it’s not much. It never is, and that’s the whole point. For every request you grant there will be dozens you’ll have to decline, managing a tight balancing act between keeping your people moderately happy and your coffers and supply stores filled.
Yes, Your Grace reviewDeveloper: Brace at NightPublisher: No More RobotsPlatform: Reviewed on PCAvailability: Out now on PC
Yes, Your Grace has three distinct phases following plot developments. The first hour is like a tutorial – here you only dole out resources or send out your general with the highly medieval name Stan to solve arguments or protect villages from bandits. Everyone is still moderately happy. But soon war is brewing as the Radovians, barbarians from beyond the mountains, come to collect on the princess you promised them 13 years ago. There’s nothing for it but to quickly marry her off to someone else to gain an army, then start preparing for war. I don’t want to spoil everything but it’s safe to say that things only get progressively worse from there on out, not only because you now have more demands than ever to juggle. Besides your general you can use a witch and a hunter as your agents. They sort magic- or animal-related mishaps or scout the kingdom for supplies. Alliances with lords need to be forged, and your castle needs to be fortified. Agents are paid in advance, soldiers need to be fed, and then there’s that pesky bank loan I took up that’s now steadily draining away my funds…
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At times, decision-making in Yes, Your Grace feels like standing at a conveyor belt. Perhaps purposefully so, seeing as YYG’s creator Rafał Bryks was strongly inspired by Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please. And yet, as I compare Yes, Your Grace with all the other tough decision-making sims out there, from Frostpunk to The Banner Saga to Not Tonight, it falls flat in one important aspect – humanity. Beyond a happiness stat I need to maintain to avoid a game over, there’s nothing for me in this row of lemmings that makes me feel for them. Sometimes this is due to situations turning out unintentionally humorous. Instead of voiceover in a language, in YGG characters begin each sentence with a made-up language. This can work, the way it did in Supergiant’s Pyre, but this is too lilting, too close to Simlish – King Eryk wailing a plaintive “Doy” before swaying and falling from his throne in a fainting spell or the happiness metre going down to the sound effect of a sitcom studio audience aww-ing are unintentionally funny and break immersion.