I WAS A KING

I WAS A KING is listed at $4.99 on Steam.

I WAS A KING is at full price right now. We track it so you will see the moment a genuine discount lands.

The lowest we have tracked is $2.49, so this is not quite the floor.

As a recent release, discounts this early are relatively uncommon.

Genre: Indie, Strategy · Developer: Heritage Incorporation · Release: Jun 19, 2026.

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I WAS A KING drops you into the throne room of a fictional Joseon-era court where the only tool you really have is language. There’s no menu of preset royal decisions here. You read what your ministers and subjects bring you, then you write your answer in your own words, and the game actually parses what you said and how you said it. It’s a small, tightly bounded political simulator from Heritage Incorporation that treats a sentence like a lever you pull on the entire kingdom.

How it plays

Each day on the throne brings two petitions. You read them, then type a decree in natural language rather than picking from a list. The game cares about tone as much as substance: you can answer the same petition mercifully, ruthlessly, evasively, pragmatically, or recklessly, and the court reacts to that choice as much as to the policy itself. Behind the scenes you’re juggling royal authority, treasury, public sentiment, rumors, and pressure from rival factions, all of which shift in response to what you wrote. Two advisers, one leaning Left and one Right, offer competing readings of your reign, and their trust in you rises or falls depending on how your decrees line up with their instincts. Push one too hard and they can resign, handing their seat to a successor with a different voice and different advice. None of this runs on hidden dice rolls: the consequences are authored and deterministic, and some of them don’t land right away, they surface later once the court has had time to remember what you said. A full reign runs about four hours and closes with a final record summing up the kind of king you turned out to be, with multiple possible endings depending on your choices.

Who it’s for

This is built for people who like reading and writing more than clicking, the kind of player who enjoyed the interrogation of choice-and-consequence in games like Reigns or Suzerain but wanted the choices to be actual sentences instead of swipes. If you like political intrigue, court drama, and watching your own phrasing come back to bite you later in the story, this is a good fit. If you want combat, exploration, or a game you can sink dozens of hours into with sprawling branching content, look elsewhere. It’s also worth knowing going in that adviser commentary is generated by a locally run AI model, so if that’s a dealbreaker for you regardless of how the core systems work, it’s fair to skip.

Is it worth it?

Given that it’s a focused, self-contained four-hour experience rather than something demanding a huge time investment, it lands well for anyone curious about text-driven political simulation without committing a whole season to it. It’s the kind of game that rewards a single attentive playthrough, maybe two if you want to see how a different tone changes your ending. As with a lot of narrow, well-scoped indie strategy titles, it’s a reasonable candidate to pick up during a sale rather than at full price, especially if you’re not certain the “write your own decree” hook will hold up for you personally.

Quick facts

Genre: Indie, Strategy. Developer and publisher: Heritage Incorporation. Platform: PC, available on Steam. Release date: June 19, 2026.