A Game Of Choices
HIGH Pulling off key battles and weighty decisions.
LOW The spiral of failure.
WTF Everything bad happens to this kingdom.
The sequel to 2020’s Yes, Your Grace, Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall continues the where the first left off. The original was going to be a hard act to follow, but I was pleased to find that while the fundamentals remain largely the same, additions to the gameplay and narrative continue its saga forward in the right way.
As the game begins, Snowfall asks players which choices they made in the first installment. It had been so long since I played the original that I had to just guess at what I had done. For new players, it’s recommended — almost essential — to play the first installment before picking up Snowfall.
Despite the fact Snowfall clearly wants players to have been through the earlier content, the beginning chapters introduced reintroduced the gameplay mechanics. The player takes up the crown to make decisions that will govern and protect their kingdom and family, and most of these choices come in the form of the petitioners who ask for help.
In this 2D, pixel-art narrative-driven title, the player will be often be seated in their throne room and approached by people who need things.
For most of these requests and tasks, the ruler has agents who can be sent out to help. However, there are a limited number of these agents, and each has limited stamina that can be allocated to act in a week. Also, some agents are better at some tasks than others. For example, if bandits have stolen something, I would assign an agent who has a bonus to combat, and if I had a relevant item on-hand, I could choose it for better results. Giving a sword which gives awards a combat bonus would increase an agent’s success rate, and sometimes additional bonuses.
Most of the time I felt like my resources were stretched thin, and trying to help as many petitioners as possible can be quite risky, as it might mean leaving the kingdom without options if something unexpected comes up. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that the Ruler’s influence gauge is high so that it can be used to ask for taxes. This allows the player to receive money or move supplies to other areas of the kingdom.
As Snowfall progressed, the balancing act between influence and resources only got harder, and by chapter three. I was forced to be extremely careful, or else one bad call would lock me into a spiral of failure — being short of money led to an uncompleted request, and that failure meant I didn’t have enough money to pay agents and buy supplies, and falling short with those prevented me from getting enough influence to get resources, and so on.
Although I was glad that my choices had consequences, my initial failures felt like they came from a misunderstanding of the mechanics. For example, I didn’t understand new uses for items and how essential they were to completing quests.
Likewise, the complexities of taxing my citizens, managing my agents, and completing objectives got far more complicated than they did the first Yes, Your Grace. The devs attempted to explain these in tutorial pop-ups as they were presented, but I was caught off-guard by the degree of planning needed. Sometimes the balance of gold needed in reserve for requests while also spending some on completing objectives left me with what felt like a razor-thin margin. Challenge and consequences can be good things, but I would have liked a little more leeway, or at least a bit more warmup before Snowfall‘s difficulty ramped up.
Like the gameplay, Snowfall‘s story does not pull its punches.
The original Yes, Your Grace had players in the role of King Eryk, but Snowfall focuses on his wife, Queen Aurelea. I found this shift to be a refreshing change, and it increased the sense of peril thanks to Eryk being incapacitated and the family in peril and driven out of normal circumstances. It all feels desperate, making the work of managing things quite intense.
Snowfall’s story proceeds at a breakneck pace thanks to constant interactions with characters, petitioners, agents and side quests. With all the twists and choices at play, it’s hard to say much about it without spoilers. I can say that the constant high stakes for both my royal family and the citizens’ wellbeing kept me engaged throughout — I might even invest time into a second run just to maximize my choices and see the best ending.
While the core decision-making content of Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall remains close to the original’s, the mechanics are a bit deeper and the narrative is strong and moves its world compellingly forward. This title is the definition of “worthy successor”, and certainly one of my favorite indies of the year so far.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Buy Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall – PC
Disclosures: This game is developed by Brave at Night and published by No More Robots. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC (with a good portion played on the Steamdeck). Approximately 15.3 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game is currently unrated by the ESRB. Please note, there are depictions of poison, drug, and alcohol use, along with depictions of violence, such as slashing with a sword or a character being burned at the stake. Most of these are simply animated pixels (not gratuitous) and some more graphic scenes simply fade to black.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. They cannot be resized or altered. There are no audio cues needed for gameplay, and all dialogue comes via text, there are no voiced lines. This game is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. There is no controller diagram. Controls use the left thumb stick or d-pad to move left and right across environments, and face buttons on a controller to interact with people or objects. Otherwise, it’s navigating menus and dialogue choices with a mixture of the thumb stick or shoulder buttons to select.
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