I thought I was holding my own in Queen’s Domain. It took a while to figure out the basics of movement and combat as I danced around carnivorous ladybugs and hid from fish that loved nothing more than to dive out of the water in pursuit of my precious derriere, but otherwise my years of experience playing games like Dark Souls and King’s Field meant I always knew what to expect. That is, until I encountered my first mimic.
Considering how many sick surprises this indie adventure loves to throw at you, I should’ve seen it coming. But when every single other chest in the opening area rewarded me with an assortment of new weapons and healing items, surely this wooden vessel atop the cliffside held similar goodies? I was a fool. The second I opened the chest, a pair of bulbous human eyes were staring back at me in ferocious anger, like I’d woken a bear from hibernation.
And now, its only goal was to tear me limb from limb.
Queen’s Domain’s mimic is the stuff of nightmares. Upon waking, a fleshy tentacle protrudes from the bottom of its chest-shaped body and two sharp claws burst from its sides, which the creature then uses to begin crawling towards you. It pursues you with an instinctual urge to destroy that nothing else in the game has had up until this point.
I can handle small insects and the occasional skeleton with ease, but this thing? It needs Jesus. I managed to outsmart it by running up a nearby staircase and jumping straight back down, creating enough distance between that horrific creature and myself that it eventually fell off a ledge and spent the next several minutes trying to find a way back up in order to keep chasing me. That’s the most terrifying thing about this game’s mimic–it never stops coming.
How the mimic is presented set my imagination running wild. Perhaps the poor monstrosity stuck inside the chest used to be an adventurer just like me, only I was lucky enough to escape and fight another day while he must spend the rest of eternity in silent agony trying to satisfy an unending hunger.
The introduction of the mimic feels like a point of no return for Queen’s Domain, when its selection of traditional fantasy enemies are slowly but surely replaced with unexpected horrors that only get stranger and stranger the more you progress. Each new area hides a cavalcade of disgusting monsters to be conquered that hit hard, look ugly, and won’t stop chasing you, even after setting them on fire. Trust me, I’ve tried.
Like King’s Field, Dark Souls, and the myriad classics it takes inspiration from and subverts, Queen’s Domain drips with an unsettling melancholy that seeps into every part of its being. The lo-fi aesthetic only adds to the foreboding atmosphere and makes each living thing you encounter feel like a dreamlike figment of your imagination come to life. It’s goofy at times, a quality furthered by the occasionally tongue-in-cheek presentation, but the grim nature of it all always rings true–especially in terms of its creature design.
The crawler, for example, is a four-legged beast that used to be human, but was gradually transformed into a quadrupedal killing machine with an upside-down mouth bearing razor-sharp teeth and a set of blood-red, human-looking pupils that seem to stare through the screen deep into your own eyes. Much like the mimic, it feels like a monster begging for help, or to be put out of its centuries-long misery.
Chickets and Ratbugs are homunculi cobbled together by some unknown force, like the living things that used to call this realm home became the playthings of sorcerers who view the mortal world as little more than a means to an end. Pus Bags used to be human as well, before being struck by magic that turned them into piles of ooze with giant eyes and rotting teeth.
You fight hundreds of these creatures in the opening area alone, and it’s fascinating to encounter new variants the deeper into this universe you dare to venture. According to the in-game bestiary, I’ve only bumped into 22.6% of the monsters in Queen’s Domain, but every single variant tells a compelling story. These monsters frighten me, but their intriguingly horrific designs and lore also ignite a fire of curiosity within me that makes it impossible for me to walk away. It is so rewarding in its combat and exploration because you are always discovering something beautifully macabre to sink your steel into.
Rather than using its retro aesthetic to present us with enemy designs we’ve seen countless times in the genre before, developer Freshly Baked Games decided to use Queen’s Domain’s lack of realistic detail to make hostile entities that blur the lines between dreams and reality. They fascinate and frighten in equal measure, as if something from your deepest, darkest consciousness has stepped out and taken form for the very first time. So far, the mimic has been the most memorable, but I eagerly look forward to being surprised with a new horror down the line.
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