Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Amorous Adventures of Bold Sir Hans Capon

This one bills you up front and pays out late. My first fifteen hours in Bohemia were one long humiliation cycle: losing duels to drunks outside a tavern, failing to pick a chest lock that a competent thief would have opened in four seconds, and sprinting from bandits on an empty stomach in a stolen shirt that made everyone in town treat me like a vagrant. Warhorse asks for patience, a tolerance for fiddly menus, and the willingness to read a recipe book like homework before you are allowed to be good at anything. Then, somewhere around the moment I landed my first clean master strike and brewed my own Saviour Schnapps instead of begging for one, the whole thing clicked and ate a weekend. What sits under that long, faintly ridiculous title is the full 2018 Warhorse simulation of medieval Bohemia, with the Hans Capon material stitched in as a companion questline rather than a separate toy. No magic. No dragons, and believe me, I checked. Combat is a directional system where you aim strikes into specific attack angles, chain them into combos, and hunt for the master strike, a parry and counter fired in one motion. It is hard, and it is completely unfair the moment three men surround you, which is exactly the intent. Skills rise through use: swing a sword to get better with swords, drink to raise your tolerance, and read books to stop being illiterate, because Henry begins the game unable to read and the letters physically swim on the page until his literacy catches up. Alchemy happens at the bench by hand, grinding herbs, working the bellows, watching the hourglass while following a recipe you had to buy and memorise. Reputation is tracked per settlement, and guards remember your face, your clothes, and whether there is blood on them. The writing is why I stayed. Henry is the least power-fantasy protagonist in any recent RPG: a blacksmith's son who is bad at everything at the start and is still, forty hours later, a competent amateur rather than a legend. His arc works because the game never lets him skip a rung. Hans Capon is the best thing in the package, a spoiled young lord whose bravado keeps colliding with his own incompetence, and the courtship storyline built around him leans into farce with poetry, disguises, and considerably more drinking than any plan requires. It is a comedy side story about a nobleman who cannot get out of his own way, and it lands because the base game has already spent dozens of hours establishing how petty and grounded this world is. Dialogue checks pay off the stats you actually invested in, and a persuasion attempt can fail because you turned up filthy, which I respect enormously. Where it disappoints: quest design has real padding. There are tailing missions, stealth sections that fight the physics, and a genuine number of run across the valley, talk, run back errands that exist to burn clock. The Saviour Schnapps save system is defensible in theory and irritating in practice, and I lost progress more than once to a crash rather than a bad decision. Combat that feels magnificent one-on-one degenerates into flailing against groups. Some quests still hitch or soft-lock in ways that years of patches have reduced but not eliminated. And if you bought this specifically for the Hans Capon content, be clear-eyed: it is a few hours of well-written comedy inside a sixty-hour simulation, not a reason on its own to sign up for the whole ordeal. So who is this for? Anyone who wants an RPG where competence is earned rather than granted, who enjoys reading tooltips and recipe books, and who finds the absence of magic freeing rather than dull. Immersive sim fans will appreciate how many systems talk to each other, from hunger to reputation to how loud your armour is at night. If you want responsive action combat, a forgiving save system, or a story that hands you the sword in hour one, this will annoy you for fifteen hours and then keep annoying you. Everyone else gets a historical RPG with no real competition, provided you treat the first act as an apprenticeship rather than a bad opening.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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