The developer FromSoftware, now renowned for titles like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, began its legacy with the King's Field series. A recent deep dive into King's Field: The Ancient City, the fourth installment released on PlayStation 2, highlights the brutal difficulty and deliberate clunkiness that laid the groundwork for its more famous successors.
Despite its modern-day awkwardness, stemming from dated camera controls and hitboxes, King's Field 4 offers a fascinating glimpse into the origins of FromSoftware's design philosophy. The game demands patience, with players often dying from seemingly innocuous actions like walking forward or encountering environmental hazards.
FromSoftware's signature difficulty is apparent from the outset. The introduction, featuring a striking cutscene and a memorable guitar score, quickly gives way to player confusion regarding basic controls like movement and camera manipulation. This initial disorientation often leads to swift in-game deaths.
Navigating the game's mechanics proves to be a significant hurdle. Players must figure out how to equip weapons and even how to attack, with some learning taking upwards of 15 minutes and external research. The game also presents players with seemingly obvious choices, such as acquiring boots from a hazardous lava river, which often lead to further peril.
Saving and healing mechanics are similarly opaque, requiring players to discover specific points in the world rather than relying on intuitive systems. An hour into play, one player had managed only to kill a few plant monsters and die once to an unseen hazard, still without fully grasping the game's core systems.
The narrative elements, while setting a dark tone, also contribute to the player's struggle. Quests involve retrieving items for NPCs, such as a "Rock of Life," with the unsettling implication that missing persons have met grim fates. The game also features familiar FromSoftware tropes, like environmental poison hazards, which are introduced early and often.
The experience of navigating poisonous areas, particularly a treacherous lake with sinking wooden planks, highlights the game's most frustrating aspects. Awkward camera angles and slow movement exacerbate the challenge, leading to prolonged periods of struggle that tested the patience of even dedicated players. This particular section proved so arduous that it led to an early end for one player's attempt to complete the game for a review.
While the game's difficulty is a significant barrier, the journey through King's Field 4 also offers a unique perspective on the evolution of FromSoftware's design. The deliberate pacing, punishing mechanics, and atmospheric world-building all serve as early indicators of the challenging, yet rewarding, experiences that would come to define the developer's later titles.