Queen’s Domain Review – True Dungeon Exploration Challenge

When an evil goddess’ revival threatens the balance of the world, a kingdom sends their prince to stop it. You are defenseless upon arrival and must find everything yourself. With some guidance from the allies you meet, battle various enemies and explore several locations. Developed by Freshly Baked Games LLC and published by Future Friends Games, Queen’s Domain is a dungeon crawler that truly tests your skills.

You are a prince who has embarked on a journey to find your father. An evil goddess is about to reawaken and your father has sailed to the Isle of Neasied to stop her. However, it’s been several months and there has been no news. You sail to the island yourself but get caught in a shipwreck. Though you survive unharmed, you must find a weapon and get your bearings. As you learn about the island and explore new locations, you come into conflict with the goddess.

The story itself is simple but it works in Queen’s Domain’s favor. I wasn’t expecting something that would draw me in or tug at my heartstrings. You likely know how the story will end and the twists likely won’t surprise you. However, the focus is on the gameplay and the story is mostly in the background; your motivation is driven by progressing to different parts of the island and fighting powerful enemies, but nothing more.

Gameplay is first-person exploration as you travel through various locations. You wield different weapons and fight enemies while solving puzzles to progress. One weapon, the Holy Sword Endu, lets you dash across distances almost like flight. Enemies have various resistances and you must find multiple weapons to target different weaknesses. By utilizing Endu and the environment, you can find methods to progress further on the island. Eventually, you fight powerful enemies that drop items that also benefit your exploration.

Queen’s Domain has a stamina system that prevents you from rapidly swinging your weapon randomly. At max stamina, your attacks deal lots of damage. Without stamina, your attacks barely do anything. This made me choose perfect times to attack and I spent time analyzing enemys’ attack patterns. I also had to watch my surroundings and think about places I could retreat to when avoiding attacks.

This made combat more tactical instead of a hack-and-slash experience. I couldn’t just cut through several enemies and had to consider my surroundings. Were the odds in my favor? Could something go wrong? These questions (and more) immersed me in Queen’s Domain and made me feel like a proper explorer. New locations were a welcome sight, but also a new challenge as I had to consider the threats along the way.

As you fight enemies, you gain experience and weapon proficiency that help you gain strength. Enemies that once gave you trouble are on the receiving end once you gain enough experience. Coupled with save points that allow you to fully restore your health, this creates decent training opportunities. Rather than pressing ahead, I sometimes took the time to train; memorizing enemy locations and easily dispatching them made it easier to solve puzzles or find new items.

Combat has two downsides: enemy respawning and tutorials. Enemies respawn whenever you rest at a save point but what the game doesn’t tell you is that they can also respawn after time passes. This was frustrating to find out because enemies can respawn while you are investigating an area. I was under the assumption that enemies don’t respawn until you rest, only to get into unexpected fights when I thought an area was safe.

Tutorials also appear after you have experienced something like a status effect, but they don’t provide much information, leaving most of the investigative work to you. That means finding items that cure status effects, learning the right timing to dash, or secondary attack movements. It can be fun to learn on your own, but at a certain point, I felt like I was constantly learning on my own. Descriptions only cover the bare basics and then left me to my own devices.

The island is full of surprises and puzzles that make you think about how to proceed. There’s always a path forward, you just have to find it. Searching every nook and cranny for clues often yielded unexpected surprises, which added to the fun of exploration, and made me feel like an amateur detective. As a solo explorer, I was in charge of finding a way forward or the answer to a puzzle. If I wanted clues, I’d have to find it myself.

As fun as it was to search for clues, Queen’s Domain doesn’t hold your hand in regards to exploration. You don’t know what your next destination is or your current objective. These are things you must search around and locate on your own. I didn’t have a problem with this, but it also prolongued the game’s length considerably; most of my time was spent searching for something to complete or bypass without knowing what it was.

Queen’s Domain immerses you in the challenge, forcing you to train and upgrade your equipment. Exploring new areas gives you a sense of wonder and gaining new abilities feels meaningful. There is absolutely no handholding and you spend lots of time figuring out what your objective is. It’s an intense battle that may leave you drained, but you are rewarded for your perseverance with challenging fun.

Victor reviewed Queen’s Domain on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.