Developed by studio Brave at Night, and published by No More Robots. Yes, Your Grace is a linear Narrative strategy game. Emphasis more on the narrative than the strategy in this instance. Be the king, make decisions, keep your throne under you and your people away from the pitchforks.
You are King Eryk of Grevno, you spend your weeks listening to the concerns of your subjects and attempting to balance long term threats and short term needs. On top of that, your wife and three daughters have constant needs that need to be managed.
That all sounds fairly hectic, but Yes, Your Grace handled it all in a theoretically simple manner.
Yes, Your Grace is part of the growing genre of narrative games with strategic gameplay elements. Think Reigns, Frostpunk, This War of Mine. Generally, your core concern is management of four resources.
- Gold (used for paying people and buying things)
- Supplies (used to feed your army and support your people)
- Soldiers (Used to defend your kingdom at key story moments)
- Contentment (used to show how happy your citizens are with your rule)
The twist here is that blend of responsibilities. You’re a king to many subjects and lords, and a patriarch to four separate family members.
Overall, the core loop is: The king sits on his throne, listens to a queue of petitioners and grants their requests, suggests another path, or sends them away.
There’s a very interesting underlying element whereby some petitioners will lie to you. Trying to work these out beforehand is tricky but it does add an extra hitch to decision making with your limited resources.
Otherwise, it’s picking which lords you’d like support from or deciding which town you’ll send resources/agents to.
You’ll be making compromises by the second week. Two towns both need gold, but you can’t afford both. Maybe one is lying to you? Maybe both are?
What’s a shame is that I didn’t necessarily feel attached to all the decisions I was making. A later part of the game sees you trying to work with the various petitioners and going back to them. The game tracks their petitions and your actions in a log that you can access at any time. This was handy, similar events (mudslide in a village/flooding in a village) blended together in comparison to some of the truly unique requests.
All of this is in service to the wider goals of the kingdom anyway though. The game opens to a seemingly doomed battle in media res and flashes back one year. Then you progress through 52 weeks, with several major events including an invasion and legal trial.
These large events are the ever looming roadblocks that you have to work to climb over.
In terms of the story and the writing, the game went to several places I didn’t really expect. The art, music and general feeling of the game suggested something fairly romanticised for a fantasy story.
The way in which the story actually played out though is much darker and “realistic”. It’s a struggle between two tones that plays out over much of the game and I’m not sure it ever fully resolves itself satisfactorily. I enjoyed what was there. In particular, the family characters all felt fully developed and I appreciated the moments I got with them that paid off. The issue was with the the levity that appears feels like it’s there to pull the darker elements of the story back from being truly grim. It’s necessary for balance but it also slightly undermines the sincere moments.
If there’s one further issue I had with the writing. It was a little too liberal with the pop culture references. For example, the story about the hedgehog knight and the famous book about the old white haired man killing monsters was particularly egregious. Considering how well integrated and interesting the rest of the world building is, I just found these sudden asides jarring. In particular, I liked the references to Slavic folklore and myth. I wanted to stay in that world, not be drawn back out by references to Game of Thrones or Solomon.
Mechanically speaking, it’s very worth calling out Yes, Your Grace’s good save system. You can at any point return to the start of any given week within the story and then re-select your choices from then on. It allows for a minor degree of experimentation, but more importantly allows for simple errors to be corrected by just restarting the week.
There was an order of operations to tasks in certain weeks that only revealed itself as I worked through the petitioners in the king’s chamber. Having an option to reset was a godsend.
The key art is wonderfully characterful, and having that initial framing helps with the pixelised version of the family the main gameplay revolves around.
Music is a particular point worthy of praise. Medieval sounding, without falling into the trap of a Greensleeves sounds like. Credit has to go to composer Filipe Alves for really finding a distinct but appropriate sound for the game.
Yes, Your Grace is modest in it’s intention. It wants to tell a story about King Eryk and his family and his kingdom. This is not a simulation or a city builder. Ultimately you’ll make decisions but they’re contained and relate back to those three core elements. In being that game, it works. The story has enough relatable hooks to draw you in. The strategy has enough options to keep players thinking. It’s enjoyable in the sense of what it is. Modestly ambitious and successful at what it wants to do.
Yes, Your Grace is currently available on Steam at an appropriately modest £15.49, with a further 10% launch discount available.