Kingdoms and Castles is cozy – but there’s nothing but crunch beneath the surface

Kingdoms and Castles lulls you into a false sense of security. You start with a single keep, a handful of peasants, and a patch of fertile land. The music is gentle, the visuals are bright, retro and deliberately blocky, and the early game feels like a medieval sandbox. All you need to do is build a farm here, a cottage there and maybe a statue for a bit of flair — it’s cozy, it’s charming, and it’s deceptively simple.

Developed by Lionshield Studios, Kingdoms and Castles tasks players with building a thriving medieval city from scratch. You’ll manage food production, housing, industry, and defenses, all while responding to seasonal changes and external threats. Viking raiders arrive by boat, dragons swoop in from the skies, and your citizens — adorable little blocky figures — go about their lives with near-complete autonomy.

But while Kingdoms and Castles presents itself as a lighthearted city builder, its systems grow increasingly complex as your kingdom expands. What begins as a relaxing exercise in town planning quickly morphs into a delicate balancing act. To get gold and pay for advanced buildings, a tax office must be opened and the rates adjusted to fund your treasury without driving citizens away. Job assignment priorities need to be micromanaged to ensure your farms are staffed, your quarries are productive, and your defenses are manned. But then, as your population grows, so does the pressure to maintain happiness, health, and food security.

Ironically, the external threats — Vikings and dragons — often feel less dangerous than the internal ones. Once you’ve built a few ballista towers and stone walls, most raids become manageable. But mismanaging your economy? That’s where the real chaos begins. A poorly timed tax hike can lead to mass emigration, whilst a bottleneck in job allocation can leave your granaries empty. 

This happens most often when your city reaches a certain size and the systems start to buckle under their own weight. The layers of complex mechanics build up slowly, but they crash down quickly. Whatever causes it — plague, fire or famine — a failure to staff one of your jobs at the expected level will cause everything else in the chain to falter. Then come other disasters. You reallocate your fire teams onto farming and a fire will break out, you try to change it back and food production dwindles. The only solution I found was to scale everything back equally — until I had a worker surplus in a smaller population. It’s frustrating. 

This isn’t necessarily a flaw — it’s part of the challenge. But it does mean that Kingdoms and Castles shifts from cozy builder to systems puzzle faster than expected. There’s no real automation, no zoning tools, and no advanced overlays to help diagnose problems. You’re left to manually tweak and observe, which can be satisfying in small doses but overwhelming in larger cities and especially if you expand onto adjacent islands (which essentially have their own keep and set of systems.)

Visually, Kingdoms and Castles is delightful. The art style is minimalist but expressive, with bright colours and smooth animations. Seasons change, clouds roll in, and your citizens dash about with goods on their backs. It’s a world that feels alive, even when things are going wrong. The soundtrack complements the tone perfectly — gentle, unobtrusive, and surprisingly emotive.

Kingdoms and Castles is a charming, deceptively deep city builder that rewards careful planning and punishes complacency. It’s perfect for players who enjoy watching their towns grow organically, but it demands attention once the systems start to stack. If you’re looking for a relaxing medieval sandbox with just enough bite to keep you engaged, this one could be worth a look, but don’t be too surprised if it takes you a few failures to understand each and every system. 

Kingdoms and Castles is now available on PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One and PlayStation.