Yes, Your Grace (Xbox One)
Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and in Yes, Your Grace, it’s resting squarely on yours. The small medieval kingdom of Davern is on the path to crises you will only be able to handle if you make the right choices, but the decisions you make when building up your army or helping your subjects aren’t merely a matter of managing resources. Yes, Your Grace’s focus is kept more on the family of the king and how outcomes impact their lives and their future, the choices less about whether you can afford to help a struggling peasant and more about hoping those close to you can have the happiest ending you can make for them.
Yes, Your Grace takes place across 50 weeks in total, each week represented by a short day and usually consisting of new petitioners approaching your throne with information or a request. The vast majority of these will be subjects of your kingdom or travelers, people who have faced some sort of strife or need some form of aid. As the king you need to keep your people happy lest they overthrow you, but such an outcome is not a particularly likely possibility. Usually a citizen of Davern will come to King Eryk with some issue like a flooded farm, village sickness, or tales of bandit attacks, and while there are the rare scammers hoping you’ll give something for nothing, most of the time the danger is authentic or at least you still get benefits for assisting the person even if they were jumping at shadows after all. Your main way to assist people is by providing either gold or supplies, these resources refreshing through taxes at the end of a week and certain factors like investing in a business or suffering damage to the dungeon can increase or decrease the weekly income. Usually the decision ends up a choice between providing gold or supplies, but you also have a few servants like a general and hunter who can be sent out to help instead of spending resources. They will then be unable to help with other tasks like investigating nearby villages or providing expertise, but it does at least add one more way you can respond to some trouble than just deciding which resource you’re more willing to part with.
Some of the petitions are a bit more interesting as tales worth reading or layered like choosing who to sponsor in a festival between three villages, but mostly they do end up blending together into similar requests. Many have kids who went missing, and many involve some mythical creature you haven’t heard of before causing trouble. The monsters are a particularly unusual choice as it’s not entirely clear how much fantasy is reality in Yes, Your Grace. At some points it goes out of its way to tell you how magic or monsters were just misunderstandings of normal things but then it seems to show something that can’t be refuted and it’s hard to say what’s real or what’s not. King Eryk seems to have ideas of things like dragons existing but it could be by way of rumor, but you’re never outright told what he knows to be true and the fictitious nature of some beasts even becomes a plot point in your relations with lords in the region. However, this doesn’t really add a more interesting element to fulfilling requests as you’re almost always best off helping and it’s more a manner of how much you can help. A few people who have issues may return to you later and try again if you can’t assist them at first, but while you can see some appreciable influence from things like building an inn providing more gold income, it’s less likely you’ll feel the negative income of failing quests or managing resources poorly. Running out of anything is an immediate loss (although autosaves mean you can jump back a week or two if you find yourself in an unwinnable situation) but if you do something like fail to pay your soldiers for a few weeks the repercussion is just losing a few each time you refuse to do so. There’s nothing more complex like a mass desertion or them being unfit to fight if a battle is near, it’s just a case of numbers management. There can be some hard choices in that department, many points in the story ask for big expenditures you’ll want to work up towards and consider when to fortify your castle at the expense of maybe not being able to help citizens, but Yes, Your Grace does feel rather gentle when it comes to the fallout of decisions.
Decisions of more import tend to tie to the grander story and the characters involved in it. Davern is a relatively small kingdom, and when raiders from another land threaten to attack, it hardly has the means to defend itself. Building up alliances becomes a key part of having enough forces for the coming battle, and doing so will require courting the lords of your land to lend their aid. As is the way with medieval royalty, offering a daughter’s hand in marriage to unite two families is a pretty strong way of inspiring loyalty, and with three daughters King Eryk is able to use them as bargaining chips. However, the game doesn’t treat this as some clinical resource to dole out to powerful allies, Eryk able to speak with his family every day and hear not only their reactions to things like promising their hands to strangers from other lands but also just observing their daily life. Princess Cedani is your youngest and an adorable scamp, trying to make pets into “secret agents” as she expresses her distaste for changes to the status quo by trying to rectify them with such fantasies of animal heroics. Her injections of comedy do a good deal to break up sometimes difficult choices and bleak scenarios, although a few comedic petitioners also keep things light enough that the overall experience isn’t dour. Asalia is a more serious consideration, her more adventurous and rebellious spirit making her the type it’s hard to imagine ever settling down with a husband. Lorsulia, your eldest, is all too keenly aware of her vital role as a way of making allies and rankles against it defining her future, the player getting to choose if Eryk sympathizes with her or recognizes it as her duty in such trying times. Routine interactions will work to endear you to your family, especially your wife Aurelea who is the closet Eryk has to a true confidant and someone who can serve as a conversational partner to mull over major choices with. Protecting your family and their happiness is made just as important as winning a war since you will see any suffering a hard choice might lead to, but choosing your daughter over the kingdom can make the story’s course harder in other areas. This can be in regards to things like soldiers as a numerical resource, but having an emotional consideration makes it deeper than a statistical evaluation.
Entreating other lords seems to continue the game’s mix of technically important decisions but ones that aren’t as complex as they could be. Most lords will expect a certain action taken that will just be a matter of doing what they say, but a few are mutually exclusive and there is some attempt to bake moral conundrums into them. A powerful ally may be doing something dangerous or deplorable, but they offer better resources and troops than the person who only will aid you if you oust the other. You may need to commit to something long term even if later questions regarding it are a bit rougher than the easy first request. Like the regular citizens of Davern their personalities can make interacting with them a bit more interesting, but the writing doesn’t put in the same degree of work it does with your family to try and sway your decisions with more emotional choices. The paths to success aren’t too hard to see and so long as you know when to refuse people to keep your resources secure then making it to the battles isn’t going to be too demanding. The battles involve mostly reactionary use of resources gained from striking deals and the investments made beforehand so they aren’t too much of a break from the choice-making gameplay that defines most of Yes, Your Grace, the only real element that seems a touch out of place being that at points in the plot you will need to grab objects around the castle for a little puzzle solving. You can normally look at things, but item use akin to a point-and-click adventure comes and goes in small amounts and it emerges first without introduction. Simply knowing it exists can remove any sense of unfairness from not having the right items when needed though, and the battles can actually prove to be rather tense as it is unclear how impactful your work will be in terms of holding off the opposition. While it can feel a little kind elsewhere, having these moments where things come to a head at least better show how choices can influence results rather than a peasant returning a week or two later to provide 6 gold and 4 happiness as thanks.
It can seem like Yes, Your Grace is mostly a vehicle for its story, and seemingly a fair bit of the major events are locked into an absolute state no matter how you try to influence it. The story is, however, helped a bit by some of the layers of uncertainty, and while you can’t divert the majority of its course, you can still make some impactful decisions like not promising a daughter to an ally, but the results of that are perhaps more meaningful in regards to how you get along with that person. The game does feature some mood appropriate music at times that enhances that emotion and the pixel art for backgrounds is done quite well, although the faceless characters perhaps are a missed chance at further trying to emphasize the human side of your choices. The story will probably be what makes or breaks the experience since it is given the most care, even at the expensive of some mechanics having greater impact, but it does do enough character work that such an allowance ensures its better aspect is stronger than it might otherwise have been if you could tank everything with sloppy choices.
THE VERDICT: Yes, Your Grace may have you playing as a king doing his royal duties, but his role as a father ends up the more compelling part. The story makes you care for your small family despite that leading to potential heartache thanks to their sometimes vital role in navigating the politics of a kingdom in need of aid. They do, however, redeem the choice-based gameplay that makes up most of the experience, the player too often weighing gold and supplies on a scale or whether an agent has the time to do something rather than really considering the potential outcomes of helping or refusing a request for help. The systems are too gentle with the player in terms of long term impact and mostly just come down to whether you have the right number of things to try and tip the numbers more in your favor, but Yes, Your Grace still has a few weighty or interesting considerations to make so that its entire premise isn’t undermined by simplicity.
And so, I give Yes, Your Grace for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. I’ve said before a game that emphasizes the choices you make in a story doesn’t need them to be impactful to its course if the story is still a riveting one, and Yes, Your Grace does touch on this a little. Your family is the heart of the game in more ways than one, the choices that impact their lives directly being the ones that hold true weight and can more meaningfully alter the course of your playthrough. It has some good emotional hooks and the difficulty comes from trying to balance your kingdom’s dire situation with the personal needs of those close to you. Those types of choices tend to be rather rare by their very nature, but it could have been more compelling if multiple lords wanted the same daughter and it could be a more interesting hypothetical consideration to send a daughter to a less wealthy man but one she clicks with. Impact or depth would do a lot to make your role as king feel more layered and meaningful; more choices on how to resolve things that maybe aren’t guaranteed to work or perhaps greater consequences for not aiding certain people would be a sound route for fleshing out what you actually spend most of the game doing. Yes, Your Grace feels at once afraid to lose the player and be unable to tell its tale but not totally afraid to demand you watch your numbers closely, but losing because you splurged a little feels like a fairly weak way to lose when it could instead be the result of cascading poor choices or the results of trying to put the wrong things first in your decision making.
Yes, Your Grace still does make its 50 week tale of a kingdom grappling with hard questions an interesting tale to follow, but the quibbling done over small details doesn’t feel like its main point and thus the attention given to it for the bulk of your time with it ends up weakening some of its efforts to keep you invested. A trimmed down visual novel with only the most important of choices could have perhaps kept a cleaner balance, but there is still some entertainment to be found in trying to balance the books on top of your life even if that crown on your head is much lighter than an old phrase made it sound.