When the great eye of The King is Watching, you better be ready to get back to work.

The King Is Watching comes to us from relative unknowns Hypnohead, but is published by the figurative giants tinyBuild. To give you a quick idea of what it’s about, Imagine Lord of the Rings, but in this instance the all-seeing eye is not that of the enemy — it’s that of the king. Of who, in this case, you are their avatar.

Within your castle, the people only work when the king’s eye is upon them. The eye starts off as an L-shaped two and one grid that you place with a simple click and rotate with another, and all squares within that area begin to work.

Those squares might be simple resource spaces such as clay pits, forests, wheat fields, crystal mines, and the like — or training grounds for the valiant troops who will defend your castle.

You also get more advanced versions of each space. A small forest might contain 200 wood, meaning it will take that many seconds of the eye’s gaze to fully harvest before vanishing and freeing the tile. The advanced version doesn’t work any faster, but it contains 1000 wood instead. The same logic applies to the other basic resources: wheat, gems, clay, gold, and ore.

Quickly, your run of The King is Watching expand. You may start with simple resource tiles and basic troop builders, but this rapidly shifts. Soon you’re placing advanced units like unicorn stables, explosive carts, mushroom warriors, and a whole host of wizard types. This escalation is necessary, because the vast enemy horde never stops throwing more dangerous and more varied creatures at your walls.

The game can be summed up like this:

You start spinning a plate.
You then need more plates, so you spin them.
Now the plates are on fire.
Now goblins are throwing plates at you.
And you are the only person in the kingdom who can multitask.

It’s marvelous.

The levels never stop. You can pause to place buildings, command troops, or deploy spells, but once you unpause, the clock begins ticking again and the enemy banners continue their slow, inevitable march toward your castle. During a run, you typically get around two minutes between waves. That sounds generous — until you realize how much there is to juggle in that time.

Even if your army looks more than capable of holding the line, you can never stop collecting resources. You’ll need them to replace fallen troops, expand the size of territory the king’s eye can command, or raise the cap on how many units you’re allowed to field. The Volcano expansion reinforces this need mercilessly, making downtime feel like a luxury you can no longer afford.

Visually, the game uses a pixel art style that suits it perfectly. The ruler you’ve chosen for your run — each with their own rechargeable spells — sits in the bottom right of the screen, usually doing something silly like cleaning their ears with a sword.

There are so many options for upgrading your game. Using points earned through game runs, you can add advisors to your King that give you a host of different bonuses, you can expand the building space within your castle and a boatload of other things for you to discover as you play, and enhance your future runs.

The new Volcano Expansion takes the original game’s pressure and cranks it up another notch. With new threats to your castle, you also have the new Rune resource to manage. Runes are gained by sacrificing certain warriors and resources, you can gain them by adding additional difficulty to waves, and finally through a new building type that will generate the resource when under the king’s gaze.

With the building of your rune supply, you will unlock buildings, spells and enhancements. To keep on using my plate metaphor, it’s a delicate balancing act to build up your runes to get the bonuses and making sure that you keep on track with your other resource collection and force building, or all of it will be for naught as the enemy rips down your castle walls and devours your people.

As with most roguelike games, The King is Watching does suffer from the curse of random number generation. What buildings appear on your runs can cripple you, as you may need a certain resource to unlock your best building, that you desperately need to stop the dragon that you know is approaching, but you never get that, and so your simple villagers are quickly devoured, no matter how much gold and wood you had previously stored. My kingdom but for a bag of flour. The upgrades you can unlock include things like rerolls, but they never feel enough.

The King Is Watching never takes itself too seriously, which helps soften the blow when the game, the volcano, and the enemy army all decide that now is the perfect time to ruin your day. I really enjoyed my time with the game, it was simple to learn, but difficult to master. And a good way to kill thirty mins, which I may have done a few dozen times now.

But I best get back to work writing, for the King is Watching, always.

The King is Watching is available now for PC