Yes, Your Grace Review - Balance The Needs of Your Kingdom and its Citizens

Written by Brandon Hofer on December 26, 2020

Reviews: It is your job to protect your Kingdom as well as make sure it thrives as a result of the decisions you will have to make.

Yes, Your Grace is a fun little kingdom management RPG. You are the king and it is your job to run your kingdom as you see fit. This includes meeting with people every day and hearing what they have to say and then helping them out, if you feel like it. Along the way there are many difficult choices that you have to make about who gets your help and who doesn’t. Sometimes a lack of resources might make it impossible to help someone in need, even if you really want to help. The people you do end up helping will try and return the favor in some way as the game goes on, while those you turn away might resent you and no longer want to have anything to do with you.

The story of Yes, Your Grace revolves around a couple of key events. Your kingdom is going to be under attack soon and as king you are trying to make allies and do whatever needs to be done to insure your survival. It isn’t long before a major roadblock is thrown in your way though as an important figure gets killed at a party you were throwing, and you are one of the prime suspects in the murder. So in addition to trying to prepare your kingdom for war, you need to conduct an investigation to prove your innocence. You do this a number of different ways from sending people out to investigate nearby towns or other areas, summoning people to the throne room to examine evidence that has been found, enlisting the help of different people such as a hunter or a witch, and more. Your family is at your side trying to help you out in any way they can but they also have their own set of issues that you will have to deal with throughout the story.

The gameplay for Yes, Your Grace is fairly simplistic and something everyone should be able to grasp quickly. It is largely text-based as you consider your options and then decide what to do. Once you have met all of your visitors for the day you can leave the throne room and see what your family is up. One of your daughters might want to do some sword fighting training with you, while your wife is worried about the future of the kingdom, and your youngest is trying to find new agents (basically pets...for the most part) so that she can train them and send them on some secret missions that I won’t spoil in this review. In addition to all of that you must juggle your relationships with other kingdoms. The army headed your way greatly outnumbers what you have to offer so you need to form an alliance with other kingdoms so that they will join in the fight and try to make things a bit more even from a numbers standpoint. You need to be careful though because if you team up with one king, it might alienate another and they become an enemy. It adds another level of strategy to the game that I enjoyed as I considered a number of different factors, including how many soldiers each potential ally could give me.

As the weeks go by you will need to delegate tasks to your subjects but keep in mind what is coming up on the schedule. For example, if you need your hunter for a task in Week 17 but send him on a three week mission on Week 16...obviously he won’t be there for Week 17 and you might miss out on something important. You also have a very limited number of people you can send out to different places so you will have to prioritize what gets taken care of first and what will potentially end up being ignored. Achievements are tied to his as well, with one specific instance being whether or not you want to help a certain group of people. If you do, you’ll receive an achievement but if you ignore all of them, you’ll receive an achievement as well. It makes it so that if you want to get all of the achievements you will probably have to play through the game twice. That isn’t too much of a problem though since the game is relatively short, and should probably be done a lot quicker during your second playthrough since you already know what to expect and what to do with some of your decisions.

Throughout all of this you will need to manage the kingdom’s finances and resources. There will be a weekly summary you can check out which will detail how much money you are making and spending and exactly where you are with your finances. You can choose not to pay your soldiers for the next week if you are running low on money, for example, but they might end up resenting you and some might leave. You can also choose to not pay your Hunter for a week but if someone comes to you requesting the help of the Hunter, they will be unavailable. There is a nice give and take here where you need to juggle what you think will be the most important and then budget everything accordingly.

Yes, Your Grace is a fun little indie title. You can get through it in a couple sessions, or even one long session if you want to play from beginning to end at once. The only real complaint I have about this game is that the save system could use a little work. It tends to save after every week but there were a couple of times it didn’t. Also the “Continue” button in the main menu wouldn’t work for me so I had to use the “Load” option. This is really minor stuff and didn’t take away from the experience but I thought I should mention them. Overall, I enjoyed my time with this title and if they make another one, I would be interested in checking that out as well. If you are tired of some of the big blockbuster titles that have been released recently, give Yes, Your Grace a shot. You might like what you find and maybe you will be the king that saves the day.