Long Live the Queen — HA!

Kim Nguyen plays Long Live the Queen

Hanako Games’ Long Live the Queen is a princess story all about facets and demanding respect. You play as Princess Elodie, who must replace her late mother as queen by the end of the year. It’s a princess power fantasy where you learn all about Elodie’s world so that she may navigate politics both at home and abroad and survive attempts on her life. It’s a brutal game, as you learn how to progress by failing and/or dying repeatedly. It’s maddening for perfectionists.

Long Live the Queen is one of those deceptively simple spreadsheet simulator games where the appeal is that it is really, horribly, unfairly difficult. Basically the only decisions you can take is what classes to send Elodie to, how she spends her weekend to help change her mood to get bonuses in her classes and hope you can take the right decisions during the cut scenes, which is when all the action happens. Some of the crisis events are triggered, some are random, some unavoidable but all you can only prepare for either by accident or because you’ve played it before and died. (Unless you cheated and had the wiki open next to it.)

Not a game with much of a visual glamour going on, so if that’s your bag, this is not for you. At best you get scenes like this, with princess Elodie looking at you depressed, angry or happy depending on her exact mood. All the real interest is in beating the story, which has set you up for failure. Having played it for a couple of hours, I can say it’s really frustrating to be blindsided by something you have recovery of; it needs an entirely different mindset to play than the sort of game I normally play, where there’s always room to correct a mistake you make. Here, you die and have to restart.

So instead you have to find out the perfect combination of skill training and luck to make it through the crisises that hound you and hope the game has mercy on you. But it probably won’t.