Queen’s Domain Review: The Perfect Skyrim Replacement for Right Now

That took some grinding on my end, and plenty of swift retreats to the scant save points in the early areas. Queen’s Domain bifurcates saving and “resting,” which renews your life at the cost of repopulating the map with enemies. Players can really figure out their own rhythm for conquering the early challenges. And did I mention they’re really challenging? I was screaming in fury at my umpteenth demise, and screaming even more when I finally jumped through all the hoops to reach my first boss, a towering skeleton warrior who knocked me back to square one — and the game’s first save point. Brutal. Wildly entertaining.

The difficulty of Queen’s Domain ebbs and flows as you power up and obtain increasingly heavy-metal-album-cover weaponry, but the oddities you encounter only escalate. The team of two at Freshly Baked Games has the same doodler imagination as FromSoft’s creature designers, but a lower bar for “realism,” meaning there are tons of whacked-out creatures around every turn, from venom-spewing Big Mouth Billy Bass to killer hardcover books to wicked gremlins and beasties so indescribable they could only exist in the graphical vocabulary of 1996.

It’s possible the labyrinthine map of Queen’s Domain creates an optical illusion of just how much danger is packed into the game. One minute you may be trekking across a field, only to dive into a hole and discover that a pillar you passed several save points ago wasn’t just scenery, but a reward-hiding platform you could only reach later in the game. The map is constantly crisscrossing into itself, and the early discovery of the “Legendary Holy Sword Endu” allows you to fly across sections you assumed were nothing more than background scenery.

As a precision experience, the combat is, in a way, refreshingly haphazard. Like a Soulslike, the big bosses demand a certain amount of pattern recognition and coordination. Other times, a horde of oversized mosquitoes swooping at you while a sea-spitting barnacle launches water blobs your way means the only “right” way to fight is to zigzag around like a madman, flailing with a fully powered-up sword. (Pro tip: You can charge your hits, and you won’t survive without learning how to do so. And no, the game won’t teach you that.) The chaos of survival, paired with the limited resources you can acquire along the game’s unspoken missions, dramatically increases the fun of Queen’s Domain for my sadomasochistic, Skyrim-craving brain.

I am “over 10 hours” into Queen’s Domain (thank you, Nintendo, for not telling me the honest truth). By all accounts, I’m just getting started (probably because I sucked at the beginning, but don’t shame me). The game was made by RPG masters who know exactly when to hit you with the dopamine rush of a collectible, a new melee technique, an XP level-up, or access to a place you absolutely do not want to be in your current state but have complete permission to explore as you see fit. There is a well early in the game that, if you dare to break through its boarded-up opening, reveals… Lovecraftian horror. If only it was just one manticore.

While we all wait patiently for The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel — and we’ll likely be waiting another two years — Queen’s Domain, in its ultimate ode to pre-Dark Souls FromSoft, has reimagined fantasy-action traversal in a retro vocabulary. I’ll be honest: I want to be playing right now instead of telling you about it.