Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 continues the misadventures of the chivalrous Henry of Skalitz, the son of a 15th-century Bohemian blacksmith, as he seeks to reclaim his lost kingdom from the clutches of some noble shit. The sword that murdered the father. The prologue begins with you playing as the well-equipped and fully upgraded bodyguard of Sir Hans Capon, an irritating rogue who is also your close friend in the 2018 game. You are delivering a message to a distant lord in the hope that he will side with your own lord in the ongoing civil war. But the plot intervenes in the form of some suspiciously familiar bandits, who slaughter your entourage and turn Henry and Sir Hans into a pair of shirtless fugitives.

In the process, Henry gets riddled with arrows, loses all his progress points and his final game armor and weapons, while going through a series of embedded, narrative tutorials and dizzying flashbacks that take you to the very beginning. rescue event. A few hours later, he woke up in a bed that wasn’t his, covered in blood and filth. This is the first 24 hours of a typical British bachelorette party. All it’s missing is an awkward tattoo and a disgusting traffic cone.

Things continue to go off the rails – at least as far as my save games are concerned. Henry and Sir Hans travel to a hilltop castle but are not allowed to enter because no one recognizes Sir Hans when he is wearing burlap lifted from a corpse. Then, after Sir Hans’s provocation in a tavern, they’re locked in the stocks again – again, because no one recognizes Sir Hans when he looks like a haystack rolled over a cesspit. The energy of the bachelor party is definitely waning at this point. This shows the more mature approach of the British Bucks, where everyone secretly hates being there but feels they have to maintain standards. Wow, bois, amirite? Whoa! Ah, I remember this bar. It used to be Woolworths and you could get a double portion of Milky Bar for 30p. Comrades and gentlemen, I am actually a little sad. Can’t we go back to our Airbnb and watch Friends?

Finally, Henry and Sir Hans had a huge argument over Sir Hans’ penchant for beating up those who didn’t acknowledge his status, which resulted in Sir Hans storming off like an insufferable aristocratic loser . On a bright summer morning, Henry stood next to the stock, penniless but triumphantly losing his owner – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was finally about to begin. How will you get out of this terrible predicament? What type of Henry would you be? A wandering thief? A glib scholar? A skilled swordsman? A good Christian? A womanizing gambler? An unpredictable bum wearing clown slippers?

The answer might be all of these and more, depending on the situation or task at hand. Deliverance 2 is once again a free-form open-world historical RPG that’s as full of systems and hands-on social mobility as any other game, although you’re fundamentally reliant on upgradeable character stats. One of its new features is the ability to switch between three clothing loadouts at will. This, I hope, is the basis for chameleon-like shenanigans like kicking guards while wearing burlap and then transforming into full plate armor like Superman emerging from a phone booth.

But now, after five hours of play, my Henry has become a peaceful and peaceful flower picker. He and I had long forgotten to reconcile with Sir Hans, let alone avenge Henry’s father. Together we wandered through the undergrowth of Bohemian Paradise, scanning banks of festive tree roots and following the gurgling sound of water to the sparkling spots of hidden creeks. We fumbled through clumps of eyebright and belladonna in the dreamy forest light, identifying plants by the shape and color of their stems and leaves from the beautifully illustrated herbarium.

From time to time we stop to wonder whether we should try taking an herb to find out its properties, or seek the advice of a pharmacist. Ah, but it means going into town, which might see that fool Sir Hans again, and that’s how it goes OK Under the canopy, Amirite lads? So peaceful. Henry occasionally felt hungry, but luckily there were many cabbage fields on the edge of this particular woodland. Occasionally a bandit would kill us instantly – just like in the original game, wearing the right combination of armor really mattered, and the difference in gear quality could be heard in the clatter of the blade against the board. But enemies are easy to avoid when you’re already wandering through the bushes: just look for the investigation bunny icon at the top of the HUD.

The interface design of “Deliverance 2” is generally quite restrained and elegant. Perhaps the menus are a bit stuffy: they’re presented in expanses of soft leather, decorative calligraphy and woodwork, an insistence on materiality that also (seems to) force the developers to simulate the friction of surrounding cloth and wood. The map screen is a painted war table with starchy paper clouds hanging from it and codex beetles with trivia about the Middle Ages.

There’s some familiar HUD gear, in the shape of a horizontal compass with mission waypoints, as well as the indispensable attitude indicator surrounding the cursor during combat. As with the first game, you’ll need to angle your weapon to intercept attacks, and learning to read the NPC animations beneath the icons takes practice. But the game is careful not to cover its own geographical area, so as not to cause decoration of the geographical area. For example, you have to hunker down close to the ground to trigger a pop-up that collects an herb, which means you have to identify it first.

Sir Hans and his antics aside, sticking to the woods like this means I’m avoiding the specifics of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s period setting, although I guess my expanded herbal assortment is on par with Andreas Inderwildi’s take on the 2018 game Representative analyzes are consistent. My haphazard foraging is arguably part of what Andreas calls a tendency to view history as an “accumulation of facts,” which can be compared to the accumulation of gear and loot in an Elder Scrolls-style role-playing game Comparatively, positive performance can also be achieved through this accumulation.

As he goes on to say in that article, “realist” conceptions of history are not actually a reliable measure of a medieval “world” made up of fragmented and fragmented medieval “worlds.” opinions and accidental or intentional misinformation. In fact, this quantitative bookishness of historical representation may only obscure or sanitize some choices, such as portraying other races as murderous invaders.

It’s too early in my Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 career to offer any comprehensive assessment here. My Henry doesn’t even have shoes now. He hasn’t had a bath since the bandit attack, which is another reason why he doesn’t go into the village often – just like in the original game, you can soak your face and clothes in the manger, but if If you want to impress others, you can do it halfway. But so far, Deliverance 2’s ideas about historical practices and 15th-century Bohemia are particularly consistent with the first game.

In particular, it happily incorporates the concept of medieval society in which women were ornaments, spectators, tolerant confidants, and objects of lust. The first time you see a woman in the world of Deliverance 2, aside from the introductory animation, is as part of Ovid’s stealth tutorial, where you and Hans sneak up on some bathers. The first female character you actually talk to is a therapist; the second is the therapist’s daughter, who quickly assumes the role of Henry’s bedside therapist.

I don’t think that’s all there is to the depiction of women in Deliverance 2 – I had some relatively non-raunchy chats with at least three people, one of whom admitted to being a brothel owner – but the framework we’re using here is pretty good. “Much Boys Will Be Boys” and “Oh You” (hands on hips). I’d be interested to see if that changes. The opening scene of “Deliverance 2” is mostly about the chemistry between Henry and Sir Hans, an unapologetic jerk who both fuels Henry’s rudeness and makes you feel better because you’re not That Bad. But there are traces of something more intriguing there.

In the first game, Henry’s relatively humble beginnings were a central plot theme, something common in many medieval romance novels. This continues in Deliverance 2: in addition to the bachelor party energy, the opening argument with Sir Hans is a playable commentary on how dress and appearance are more important than the color of blood.

At one point, Sir Hans magnificently outlines the sacred distinctions between peasants, nobles, and clergy, only to stumble upon the question of which category Henry actually belongs to. Maybe it’s just common game narrative dissonance, but I like the idea of ​​historical allegory, which is about figuring out the class connections of “classless” characters in the RPG sense, being able to switch between characters as the occasion demands.

With Sir Hans out of the way, maybe I can recast Henry as some kind of insufferably precocious proto-feminist. Of course, this means I have to stop poisoning him with random forest mushrooms, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. Regardless, keep an eye out for my full review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in a few weeks.