Warsim: The Realm of Aslona developed and published by Huw Millward, is available on Steam now.
Warsim: The Realm of Aslona is a deep, rich text-based kingdom-ruling simulator with millions of procedurally generated races, events, and areas, with an emphasis on player choice. The goal is to keep your kingdom running under any circumstances, whether you thrive as a mighty empire or become a villain whom your people hate. Rule as a ruthless dictator and tax people just for breathing the oxygen around you, or become a respectable leader who trades with other alliances. Warsim offers endless choices, so you’ll never have the same run twice.
Features:
🧭Explore – Explore the rich and vast world filled with over 100 locations to be visited/bought/plundered; you can shape the world as you see fit.
✔️Choices – You will encounter gamblers, bards, tricksters, mercenaries, common folk, beggars, and everything in between, with 1000 different encounter choices that must be made for the benefit of your kingdom.
🎬Manage – How will you manage your realm? Will you install trap doors and send those foolish enough to visit you plummeting to their deaths? Or will you hire a capable steward to deal with them in your stead? The choice is yours.
🧔Characters – Warsim’s unique and in-depth procedural race generation system has been developed for years and currently produces a total of 94,887,852 possible races; you’ll never meet the same race twice.
🗺️Living world – Each race have their own laws and societal standards (like xenophobia), and varying traits depending on their racial prefixes, pulling from a large list of unique racial abilities sure to make each playthrough unique!
🏟️The Arena – The Arena is another important location within your kingdom. Here, heroes rise and fall while others are remembered for eternity, clever gamblers make their fortune, great and exalted tournaments are held, and the public sate their appetite for blood!
🎮Gameception – Games within games? You bet! Ruling a kingdom can be boring at times, and you may wish for entertainment to pass the time. Hire a Gamesmaster to fill your time when you’re bored, or play one of the many games littered throughout the taverns and locations of the world.
I have never played a text-based simulator before, but Warsim: The Realm of Aslona shows me I should have jumped into them way sooner. The title puts you in the shoes of a ruler; you are given text-based choices, and what you choose is up to you. A tutorial is provided; whether you want it explained in simple, quick terms or explained in detail, the choice is yours. I started on a casual game to get used to the feel of it, and immediately went for the nice approach. The game starts in your chambers; you will be answering to many different folk from the lands. This can range from people wanting to be recruited to fight for you; neighbour disputes; decisions on crime; listening to a jester’s jokes and judging them as good or bad (I loved this); and so many more; the list could be endless. I imagined if I treated all my people with kindness, people would respect me, be more willing to fight and so on. That wasn’t the case; if anything, I got taken advantage of. At first, while I did get a ton of gifts, rebels thought they’d use this to get one up on my kingdom and promptly attacked me. In another playthrough, the goblins wanted to donate their armies to me as long as I stopped using them as slaves. Perfect; this will bolster my armies and defend against the attacking factions – nope! My people started turning on me because they’d been raised to hate the goblins. There are always consequences to your decisions, even when you think you’re making the right one. Who said running a kingdom was easy?
Exploration is the thing I enjoyed most. You are given a multitude of lands to explore; these open up many story moments. As explained above, I tried the nice approach: I would scour the lands for people in need and help them. The one task I’d strive to take on was burning slaver forts to free them. Other times, I would take down criminal empires, or destroy undead castles to stop them from expanding through the lands. All of these tasks at first felt like the right decision, but all they did was leave me weak and undefended when the rebels, bandits and other enemy factions wanted my blood. My kindness again was my downfall… Next time, I won’t be so nice…
I had a blast; it wasn’t overwhelming at all. There is so much to do, so much to discover; I couldn’t believe it. If you’ve always wanted to try a text-based simulator, start here. For the low price of £7.99, this behemoth of a game could be yours.
