Little King's Story is a real-time strategy game that simulates life in a fictional kingdom. You play a timid boy who finds a crown that gives him power to make people follow orders. You slowly expand your village by gathering resources and gaining inhabitants.

Play involves issuing orders to citizens to direct them to tasks like in Pikmin games: build, gather and expand the kingdom. Each different person has different skills and must be used effectively. You can soon add buildings, training facilities, granneries and the like to grow your population. These followers steadily increase in strength and ability as you train them up. They can have a variety of jobs: soldier, carpenter, peasant, farmer, and hunter. The more people you have the more you can do.

It's a novel game that offers a fun city expansion and farming experience. But it's the humour, unusual characters and social commentary that make this really stand out. Although it seems like a kids' game, there is darker more counter-cultural side to the world: class and the meaning of nobility are recurring themes, what the purpose of science, art, religion, television. Even the fear of armageddon gets a look in.

As the game progresses you start to realise that your soldiers can permanently die, which results in funerals and other villages wearing black. This is underlined by boss encounters where you abuse your enemies (in one instance knocking them around to lose weight). You find notes in a maze detailing the life of someone with depression and anxiety that includes their untimely death. Morality is questioned by your minions more and more, and you become unsure whether you are so much the hero, rather than actually a villain.

Like The Legend of Zelda Link's Awakening, reality itself frays as you continue. The boss encounters in particular become increasingly bizarre and on the edge of sanity. By the end it seems that the game was actually about something different all together. Perhaps our character coming to terms with the loss of people in his life (deceased grandfathers and alcoholic uncles) before finding the crown.