Elysia, the undying continent the gods walked away from.
Monsters pour through the cracks, the old seals are slipping, and adventurers are sent out to face the Trials.
This is not a story about saving the world. It is a story about
being chosen by it.
Your three heroes fight on their own. What you command is hatred.SHADOW OF THE KINGDOM takes the real-time combat of an MMORPG and hands it to
one player. There are no turns. The clock never stops, auto-attacks keep landing, TP keeps building, and every blow you strike moves the enemy's hatred somewhere new.
Everything in a fight comes down to
timing.
One character fires a weapon skill.
Within 4 seconds, another lands a second one on top of it — the
Skill Chain connects, and the damage roughly doubles.
Drop a spell into that window before the light fades and you get a
Magic Burst: roughly
4x.
1000 TP buys one weapon skill. Who opens, who follows, and how you get a slow-casting Sorcerer to arrive on time — that single question is enough to keep ordinary encounters from turning into busywork.
TP carries over between fights inside a dungeon. Walk into the boss room with a chain already loaded.
Enemies attack whoever they hate most. That is the whole rule — which is exactly why it is hard.
Hatred is tracked in two layers:
CE (cumulative, and it drops when the target gets hit) and
VE (volatile, decaying every second). Your Guardian can taunt an enemy into place, but if the back line pushes too much damage the numbers flip, and a heartbeat later the mage is the one being hit.
- The shield holds the line. Taking hits burns its CE, so it has to keep earning it back
- The Rogue's Trick Attack dumps his entire share of hatred onto the shield
- Switch the party to a defensive stance and the back line stops the moment it passes 80% of the shield's hate
You can see the numbers the whole time, and you still cannot quite hold them where you want. That tug-of-war is the spine of the game.
You take
three of ten jobs into the field.
- Guardian — the shield. Taunts and barriers to soak what is coming
- Phantom — an evasion tank. Clones and illusions, surviving by not being hit
- Gladiator — straight damage, with follow-up strikes
- Reaver — a dark warrior who spends his own HP for power
- Rogue — hate manipulation, and an eye for what is in the chest
- Sorcerer — long casts, enormous payoff
- Spellblade — a magic swordsman who wraps elements around the blade
- Evoker — a summoner who calls the spirits
- Cleric — healing, and clearing what has been inflicted
- Troubadour — a bard whose songs lift the whole party
The AI runs all three, but you can
take manual control of anyone at any moment. Drive one and leave the rest to it, or play all three yourself for boss fights — either works.
Pause and fast-forward are there too.
Jobs climb to Lv50, and
to Lv60 once the Dark Lord falls.
Dungeons are
a grid that reshuffles on every descent. Fog closes off your view, and it lifts only where you have walked.
- Chests — gear, gold, temporary stat boosts. Some of them are mimics
- Ancient altars — reveal the map / +100 max HP / +50 max MP / full heal. One choice, once per floor
- Traps — eight kinds: damage, MP drain, forced teleport, and ambushes
- Tall grass — step in it and something finds you. Route around it, or farm it
Floor counts run from three in the forest to
twenty in the Dark Castle. Your exploration percentage sits in the HUD, so you never have to wonder whether one tile is still missing.
23 locations joined by routes across the world map. Re-equip in town, then on to the next Trial.
375 pieces of gear across weapons, armor and accessories, with Rare and Legendary quality tiers — the same name can hide a very different item.
Swap something in and
the resulting stats appear immediately, so when you are unsure, read the numbers. Take a piece to the blacksmith and
hammer it to its upgrade cap and the late-game walls visibly move.
Towns hold a black market, a desert trader and the royal library — and that is where you find the
sea chart to a hidden dungeon. The arena has eight challenges waiting, with medals and exclusive gear on the line. Everything you kill is recorded in the
monster codex, which opens up its weaknesses and resistances as you go.
After the Dark Lord is dead and the story is over, a hole opens in the floor of the world.
The Abyss — 100 floors. Every tenth floor, a king you have already beaten is standing there again, stronger. The job cap moves to 60 and the gear goes to its highest tier. Only by reaching the bottom do you see how this really ends.
55 Achievements
Clearing each dungeon and
fully mapping it (100% exploration on every floor), how deep you got in the Abyss, Lv60 on all ten jobs, completing the codex, conquering the arena — plus two hidden ones.
What's Included
- A world map of 23 locations and 18 dungeons (two of them hidden)
- 10 jobs x equippable skills x 4 party stances
- 375 pieces of gear / a 90-entry monster codex / 55 achievements
- An elemental resistance system — what gets through changes from dungeon to dungeon
- Eight languages: English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, German, French, Spanish
- Full controller support. Mouse-only play works too
- 3 save slots / original soundtrack / a 17-chapter in-game manual
The clock does not stop. So you learn to land on the beat.
That is where the
Trial begins.
