Long Live the Queen mini-review

Long Live the Queen’s moment-to-moment decisions are as unexceptional as registering for next semester’s classes. But here, death lurks for the young monarch who didn’t find benefit in naval history or public speaking. Relish those fleeting moments of optimism, the game reminds us, since a single arbitrary event can end it all.  

Simulations are habitually built around apparent correlations. Increase the population density in a city management game and predictably, you’ll witness a rise in traffic and a subsequent strain on the power grid. These sims can be daunting at first, but once you recognize the different cause-and-effect relationships, leadership isn’t a complete struggle.

Deviously, Hanako Games’ Long Live the Queen adopts a different approach. The recently released Switch port tasks players with role-playing as a fourteen-year-old princess who is forty weeks from her coronation ceremony. It’s a turbulent time for the queen-to-be. Not only did her mother recently pass away, but her father seems to be persistently scheming. And outside the castle walls, there’s a growing sentiment of discontent.

Predictability is astonishingly elusive. Each virtual week, you’ll select two courses of study, representing day and evening classes. These feed into a substantial stat pool of 42 different variables that quantify your social, physical, intellectual, and magical prowess. But how much you actually learn from each course is affected by your mood.

It’s entirely possible for an angry, depressed, or afraid princess to earn paltry gains if her temperament doesn’t mesh with the material. Over repeated plays, you’ll learn to manipulate your emotions to achieve the educational goals which are essential for survival. Your selection of weekend activities is plentiful, and the game is upfront, showing how these pursuits will influence your mood.

These are the things you can control. But much of Queen focuses on the arbitrary matters you can’t influence. If one of those 42 stats is advanced enough, you’ll have the ability to choose a suitor or venture outside. But frequently, your personality database just doesn’t have the numbers to give you autonomy. When this happens, choices will be made for you.

In execution, that means that your vibrant monarch can easily succumb to paranoia. From the milk viper that was suspiciously placed in the royal garden, the poisoned food sent by a commoner with a veiled vendetta, or the persistent threat of revolution, my first runs were marked by persistent misery and a lack of independence.

And that’s what is so remarkable about Long Live the Queen. Typically, royalty is either revered or reviled in media. But young Elodie is a sympathetic character, facing conspiracies and deception from the world around her. My first few playthroughs, I didn’t know who to trust. That sense of pessimistic seclusion is found in few games outside of the Princess Maker series. Not everyone will appreciate it, but I relished the incessant misery. Like the habitually brutal Souls games, Queen forced me to recycle the anguish of setback and somehow turn it into motivation.

Most simulations are rather static, providing a satisfying sense of progression as you learn to deal with problems that arise. While there’s some of that in Long Live the Queen, you’ll also face pathways that seem to open up over repeated playthroughs. The downside is that you’ll witness a long string of tragedies for Elodie. But realize that frequently dying is a part of the experience. The world is unrelenting, Hanako Games asserts, even for a young queen-to-be. Maybe our own ordinary lives aren’t so bad; no one has tried to murder me this week.

Long Live the Queen was played on Switch
with review code provided the publisher.