The King is Watching is a demanding, high-pressure game that still manages to maintain a sense of joviality and chaos despite the time pressure of invading forces (and a pesky volcano). Not only is attending to your frontline and city simultaneously a balancing act, but the developers at Hypnohead are on the tightrope too as they try to offer new content without making the game inaccessible to players. 3 new free updates are coming soon including Shifting Sands, changes to Endless and a new Free Reign mode.
Shifting Sands Expansion Update
The previous major update, Volcano “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.”
Now, the King will have yet another area to defend in the Shifting Sands.
The new Shifting Sands biome is set to add a comparable amount of change with new units (both on the side of the King and the denizens of the deadly desert), spell, events and of course gorgeous artwork. What makes Shifting Sands different is it acts as a catch-all for the other areas in the game. The event pool is populated with events from all areas, making runs less predictable and consistent. For players who have mastered all the current content, Shifting Sands promises to put that knowledge to the test while also introducing new enemies, bosses and events itself.
Endless Mode Facelift
The Endless Mode in The King is Watching was always a little threadbare, but now changes are underway to give the mode some meat on its bones. Rather than simply being an optimisation sandbox, Endless Mode now scales enemy power and types every wave / 20 waves respectively. This means that you’ll encounter fewer enemies than currently, but that they’ll pose more of a challenge. This stops one-shot attempts from sweeping the battlefield and enforces a new type of play style focused on a balance between longevity and damage.
Also, the lower enemy count helps not crash people’s PCs…
Free Reign Mode brings new ways to play
If you finished all the maps and didn’t fancy Endless, Free Reign mode is a new way to format your runs. You can now apply difficulty modifiers to any map you like, rather than difficulty being tied to biomes. That first boss might not be such a cakewalk if you replay the map with the highest difficulty mods! This also allows you to apply the lower difficulty mods to higher maps, making the experiences of each unique area more accessible to people not so keen on spinning 50 flaming plates at once.
The King is Watching is available on Steam and the free updates release from June 11th 2026
