Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit

I have a soft spot for point-and-click adventures that treat their setting as a character in itself, and Crowns and Pawns earns that respect straight away by rooting its mystery deep in the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. You play as Milda Kovas, a Chicago-based Lithuanian-American who flies to Vilnius to settle her late grandfather's estate, only to find the house ransacked and a threatening voice on an old walkie-talkie demanding she hand over documents she knows nothing about. Within an hour the conspiracy spirals backward to a 15th-century crown, forward through Soviet-era KGB operations, and outward across Lithuania, Belarus, and Italy. For a studio making its debut on PC, the scope is quietly ambitious. Mechanically this is classic point-and-click, done with genuine care. You click hotspots, build an inventory, combine items, and talk your way through an ensemble cast. The spacebar highlights interactive objects, which spares you the old pixel-hunting agony. What sets it apart from a straight nostalgia exercise is the light character customisation: at the start you choose Milda's professional background and a few outfit options, and those choices unlock different puzzle solutions and dialogue branches later on. It is not a full branching narrative, but it is enough to make a second playthrough feel like something other than a chore. The puzzles are mostly logical and grow naturally from the story, though a handful of timed dexterity sequences feel imported from a different game entirely and frustrate more than they thrill. An audio puzzle where you must repeat a chant you can barely hear is the one moment where the craft visibly slips. The production values are where the game makes a real case for itself. The hand-painted backgrounds are genuinely lovely, layered with the kind of atmospheric detail that rewards slow exploration. Composer Daniel Pharos (whose credits include A New Beginning and Memoria) scores each location with instrumental pieces that shift register perfectly, moving from quiet inquisitive themes in archive rooms to something tenser during encounters with ex-KGB operatives. The full voice cast is committed and likeable, even if almost every character in the English dub sounds more Chicago than Vilnius. Milda herself is warm and funny company for the six-to-nine hours the adventure runs, and the writing around her friendship with Dana adds genuine texture to what could have been a pure plot-delivery machine. The honest caveat is this: Crowns and Pawns is a game that plays it safe. It does not reinvent anything. The ending stumbles, rushing through a climactic choice that turns out to carry little narrative weight. Some critics found the middle act lacking in tension, and they are not wrong, the story keeps insisting Milda is in danger while the relaxed no-fail structure quietly contradicts that. If you come in wanting something that pushes the form, you will finish with a mild shrug. But if you come in wanting a well-crafted, lovingly detailed mystery adventure with a setting that almost no other game has touched, you will finish it in one or two long evenings and feel something close to gratitude that it exists at all.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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