Upcoming retro-inspired RPG channels Elder Scrolls and Dark Souls predecessor King's Field with a demo you can try today

If you had told me this year would see the release of a modern-retro take on FromSoftware's debut game King's Field - the franchise that sent the productivity software company down the path of creating Armored Core and commandeering the Soulslike genre - I'd… well, I'd have believed you, honestly. Demakes are all over the place lately, and I'm quite frankly here for it. Queen's Domain looks brazenly brutal and echoes some of the best RPGs around, and I can't wait to put more than an hour of my time into bashing baddies with a wedge of wood.

Queen's Domain (see, it is a love letter to King's Field) is dubbed as "a retro-fantasy action RPG with brutal combat and traversal-focused exploration." I'm not sure what that last part really means, but expect a heck of a lot of walking. No horses, no flapping dragons, and absolutely no flying through the sky with demon wings or psionic powers. Oh, but you can upgrade a Holy Sword to fly across progressively larger gaps. Outside of that contradiction, though, it's just you and your massive club against the world. And this world has big bugs. Big bugs and angry owls.

Queen's Domain drops you into a grotesque PS1-style world to find your missing dad on an isle where a "sleeping Queen has begun to stir." If you're familiar with that era of experimental 3D gaming, picture The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. It's expansive, but it looks old. In the right way.

Of course, that means there are all sorts of nasties to battle (the aforementioned bugs and birds) and items that spin in a dramatic fashion in front of your face when found. Chests house (rusty) weapons like swords and spears, but as someone with a habit of making caveman-like characters called BigManSwing in these kinds of games, it's the trusty wooden club that's too tall to fit on the screen you'll see me holding close to my chest as I beat the Queen into a bloody pulp. Calm down, she could be a massive bug for all we know.

With a demo for Queen's Domain out right now, you can bash bipedal fish, smack skeletons, and get sniped by weird laser-blasting spores on a tree. Said demo lets you go on a jolly jaunt around the opening area, take on the game's first dungeon, and get slapped around by the first "fearsome" boss. It's an hour long, with the full release set to offer "dozens of hours of adventuring and exploration." How dying over and over is factored into that is anyone's guess, but at least you can use the demo to figure out your combos and *checks notes* eat delicious food. Yum.

If you want to see what else this developer duo has cooked up, take a look at The New Flesh. It's a free (and 'overwhelmingly positive' rated) release with a similar retro-inspired look. This one takes on the humble walking simulator, swapping out high fantasy exploration for a modern, almost noir, cityscape described as "the strange world within the screen." They're a little cryptic, yes. That's their shtick.

With more and more games inspired by the wobbly mid-90s look such as Megabonk and No, I'm Not a Human hitting it big on Steam recently, strong feedback toward the Queen's Domain demo, which you can grab here, could signal that we have another surprise hit on our hands.

Sadly, there's no full Queen's Domain release date set just yet. Having been in development since 2023 (with a little break to put out The New Flesh, which sounds both impressive and exhausting), the developers hopped into the Steam forums to let us know they're aiming to release the full thing "sometime next year," with the current goal being the first half of 2026 at the earliest. Give 'em weird buggy-wuggy hell.