King's Field: The Ancient City Review

The fourth entry is the series at its most confident and still an acquired taste. The Ancient City is a genuinely good piece of level design, a vertical ruin that folds back on itself so that a shortcut opened on the third hour changes how you think about the first, and the water that poisons you on contact turns a whole district into a puzzle about where you are allowed to stand. The storytelling is the ancestor of everything the studio is now praised for, told through item text and the arrangement of corpses rather than through anyone explaining it.

The costs are the same as ever. Movement is a slow walk, swings are committed and slow to recover, and the frame rate drops whenever more than two enemies are present. There is no map in a game that badly needs one. Progress frequently depends on noticing a lever in the dark. It rewards patience most players will reasonably decline to supply.