King Lucas

I came to King Lucas expecting a tight little multiplayer dungeon racer and left with a mostly-solo platformer that has more charm than depth. The core idea is genuinely interesting: you play a knight sent into a sprawling medieval castle to rescue a princess, and every time you start a new search the hundreds of hand-designed rooms reshuffle into a new layout. No two runs look the same, and the castle scales up dramatically over time, eventually opening into a maze of over a thousand rooms. That is a real hook. The execution, however, is where things get messy. The 2.5D presentation puts flat, cartoon-style characters against simple 3D castle geometry, and it works better than it sounds. The animations are smooth, the soundtrack shifts dynamically (there is a nice muffled underwater effect), and the whole aesthetic nails that late-90s action-adventure vibe without leaning on scanline filters and fake CRT effects. Combat is another story. You start with a short-range dagger that requires you to be practically inside an enemy before it connects, and all your weapons break after a fixed number of hits. Compasses that point toward your objective run out after a minute or two. The shop system, staffed by NPC witches scattered through the rooms, sells you consumables - swords, shields, crystal balls - but nothing sticks permanently. Die and you restart at the castle entrance, though cleared rooms and unlocked doors stay open. It lands somewhere between a roguelite checkpoint system and a mild punishment loop, and it never quite commits to either direction hard enough to feel designed. The PvP angle is the thing that pulled me in: multiplayer runs multiple players through the same reshuffled castle simultaneously, racing to locate the princess first. One princess, one winner. On paper that is a decent competitive hook. In practice, the public player pool has been thin since launch and community threads confirm the lobbies are close to dead. There are also reported bugs around map and inventory toggling that can drop your character through the floor or reset your room position - not gamebreaking, but annoying enough that a few Steam discussions from multiple years post-launch still reference them. If you have a friend who owns it and you can coordinate a session, the co-opetition loop is genuinely fun. Going in blind expecting to find a match is optimistic. For the audience this actually suits - younger players, retro platformer fans who want something light on a Sunday afternoon, or anyone building out their Steam achievement list - King Lucas delivers a few solid hours. The castle reshuffling keeps early runs from feeling identical, the controller support is solid, and the self-aware NPC writing lands a few good jokes. But the shallow combat, consumable-only progression, persistent bugs, and effectively defunct public multiplayer mean this sits firmly in the lower tier of the Metroidvania-adjacent genre. Treat it as a single-player curio with a dormant PvP mode stapled on, and manage expectations accordingly.

Fred · Scout Team

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