Little King's Story

Little King's Story casts the player as the small boy Corobo, who unexpectedly finds a crown and becomes king of the decaying little town of Alpoko, which he must build into a prosperous kingdom surrounded by hostile lands. The game combines settlement building, subject management, and exploration of the surrounding world, as the player gradually recruits villagers, assigns them professions, and sends them along on expeditions into neighboring kingdoms, where strange enemies, grotesque rulers, and their own versions of fairy-tale characters like Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White await.

The core of the gameplay is recruiting and directing a horde of subjects who follow the king like in a real-time strategy game – lumberjacks fell trees, soldiers fight at his side, cooks prepare food that boosts the expedition, and scientists improve technologies. New professions, buildings, and abilities are gradually unlocked, the town literally grows under one's hands, and with it the ways to solve the world's puzzles and obstacles, including the need to sacrifice some subjects to achieve a higher goal, which pushes the game toward surprisingly bitter themes. Visually it's a fairy-tale, colorful stylization with childlike exaggeration, but hidden beneath it is black humor, political satire, and themes of growing up and the loss of childhood innocence.

The game was released on Wii in a fairly modest print run and without major marketing, yet it quickly built a reputation among critics and players alike as a hidden gem – praised above all for the originality of its concept, which couldn't easily be pigeonholed, and for its playful, memorable music. Today, Little King's Story is often cited as proof that Wii also offered unconventional, auteur-driven experiences beyond the mainstream of motion-controlled games, and even years later it feels fresh, clever, and surprisingly deep, which earned it a later remaster for newer consoles that brought it a second wave of attention from players who missed it on Wii at the time.