Take your time: Once a Pawn a King is a chess-inspired rogue-like. It just isn’t cricket. However, it just isn’t chess. We’ve seen this before, what with Gambonanza and Chessarama, though Clover Bite’s game is more like the former than the latter, and more like a dungeon crawler from the early 90s with a bit of a story, too. Hmmm… interesting.
You start with a defeated pawn and are informed that chess is broken. You need to gather your army through a series of trials and defeat the evil white king. As the black army, you start small and gradually accumulate more pieces from a party perspective. All the pieces you gather have the same traits as a game of chess; however, because it’s a rogue-like with deck-building abilities, you can also unlock skills and improve stats. The skinny? Instead of instantly losing a piece, you can build up their health levels to withstand a multitude of attacks.
Forgive the half-arsed pun, but Once a Pawn a King is all about set pieces. You’re given a scenario where you have to navigate a series of active patrols to get through to the next room and rescue the princess. Wait – it’s not that kind of game. The patrols are made up of chess pieces, which fortunately adhere to chess rules, so knights will be making their L-shapes, and queens will be fierce. The difference is that, unlike a conventional board, they will patrol a set path, and if you land within their vicinity, their next move is likely to be an attack.
Pawns really are the dark horses here as well as in the traditional game in that they can move back and forth at any angle, albeit one space at a time. And there’s lots of ‘em. This can prove frustrating in the long run, as the game leans more toward the difficult side, with significantly more enemy pieces. This is all part of the narrative, of course, so you need to have some adversity. Fortunately, those stat increases improve your survival rate, plus you can get skills that wipe out several enemies in one go, but it’s very much a game of chance.
I found that I would begin with a relatively good strategy, but required about 2-3 times more insight than a regular game of chess due to the computer moving all their characaters in one turn. The same applies to the player; however, when you may have three pieces up against – say, a 10 or 12 and they have knights and rooks, you find that there’s a lot of backtracking in Once a Pawn a King, as in: you repeat two or three moves to watch the patrols and lure out one enemy at a time. If you can.
Environments look pretty good, and they’re often filled with traps that can be used to your advantage, like pushing a piece into a chasm, à la Worms. There are also keys to collect and chests that reward with new power-ups, which, as identified earlier, are essential to play. When returning to the Steam page for some images, I noticed that the feedback for the game is very negative. The last time I saw this rating was for a triple-A review bomb. The reason for this is the number of bugs in the game. I hadn’t experienced as much of these as reported, but there’s definitely an issue with assets overlaying the screen, making it difficult to see, and other issues. Interestingly, while these happened on my laptop, played through an ultrawide, the same problems didn’t happen with the Steam Deck. That was relatively good.
Bugs can get ironed out, and I was adamant about this when Cyberpunk 2077 came out. Even on launch, I had no issue with it (I think), and now it’s considered one of the greatest games and a benchmark, though some years for correction! Once a Pawn a King had been in Early Access for some time and received some positive feedback; however, ironically, it’s more of an Early Access title due to the technical issues. Conceptually, it’s very good, and I did enjoy the narrative approach, though I wasn’t as pleased with the difficulty, as being good at chess isn’t a requirement – the gumpf for this even says, ‘Strategy without chess theory’. Ok, then.
With very negative feedback, you could say it’s so bad it’s good? I never said any of those things, but I can play the slopey shoulder game and suggest you try it first, as there’s a playable demo available. Personally, I’d stick with an actual game of chess or the more recent Gambonanza. The decision… is yours.
