The Case That Was Never Closed
Some expeditions are remembered for what they found. This one the Keeper keeps for how it fell apart — and the Keeper, who keeps everything, has always harboured a certain fondness for an honest collapse.
In the spring of 2018 the correspondent took delivery of a very fine game indeed: City of Kings, gleaming off the Kickstarter tide, a mountain of vivid cardboard promising seven branching stories and a hundred quests. He set out to chronicle a full campaign on camera — and here the record turns confessional. The story faltered, then failed; one chapter went so wrong before the coffee had landed that the whole attempt was scrapped in a two-minute apology. He reset, retreated to a single scenario, dialled the difficulty to its gentlest setting, and — training wheels bolted firmly on — at last won.
The verdict, when it came, was generous and cold at once: a beautiful, elegant, impeccably-proofed machine he admired, praised, and sold inside a week, because its lovely enemy-lore and its bag of random abilities never once shook hands.
Then, five years on, the coda that turns misadventure into thesis — a quiet vlog on why the Dungeon Dive does not do playthroughs, and never will. Filed here in sequence, the saga reads as its own small tragedy: ambition, collapse, retreat, and, at the last, self-knowledge.
Exhibit Catalogue
- City of Kings - Take a Look — a mountain of cardboard, and a spirited case for standees over grey plastic.
- ABORTED - City of Kings - Story One - Chapter One — the campaign begins bravely: two heroes, three morale, prose he adores.
- ABORTED - City of Kings - Story One - Chapter 2 (part 1) — the game bares its teeth — reflect, grab, knock-back — and the party splits badly.
- A Message about the City of Kings Let’s Play — two minutes of mea culpa; the expedition is scrapped and reset.
- City of Kings - Desecration Scenario (easy mode) — training wheels on, and at last a scenario won outright.
- City of Kings - Review — a great game, admired, proofed, and promptly sold: theme and mechanism never meet.
- Why I don’t do many (if any) let’s play videos — five years later, the epitaph: why the camera and the crawl don’t mix.
662 transcripts • 741 posts archived
– The Keeper
Observes that the archive is fondest not of the triumphs but of the honest failures — for a man who films his own collapse and titles it ABORTED is telling a truth that few reviewers dare.