Yes, Your Grace
In this kingdom management RPG, petitioners will arrive in the throne room each turn to ask for your advice and assistance. Decide whether to help them with their problems, or to conserve resources for more important matters. Remember: supplies are limited, and not everyone has the kingdom’s best interests at heart… Listen to petitioners each turn and decide who needs your support. Aid your family with their personal problems and decide upon their fate. Hire Generals, Witches and Hunters to aid your efforts. Prepare for battle and make alliances by satisfying the whims of lords and kings. Follow the stories of the quirky and determined characters that visit your halls. Yes, Your Grace tells a tale of Davern, a medieval kingdom ruled by King Eryk. The game is set in a fictional world where monsters and arcane practices inspired by Slavic folklore are the order of the day. Villagers will ask for your help with various problems, from monsters attacking the village to a lack of places to relax and enjoy themselves. Some will bring humour to your throne room and some will present you with difficult choices. Your family is important too, and throughout your time as King, you will have to support them in their struggles. You will face lords with a variety of personalities; you will need their support in order to win an upcoming battle, but some may ask you to perform dirty deeds to cement the alliance. One thing is clear: It won’t be easy to keep everyone happy…
Steam User 61
After my first playthrough, I wanted to play it again to get a happy ending
Turns out it was the happiest ending possible...
Steam User 71
What type of game is ‘Yes, Your Grace’?
It’s a story-rich, choices-matter, kingdom management turn-based point & click game.
Summary;
Yes, Your Grace is a game with a rich story about Eryk, the monarch of Davern, his family, and the vicissitudes of their lives. The game is pixel graphics, gameplay is point and click, you control Eryk and rule your kingdom by walking around your castle doing errands, talking to your subjects and family members, but for the vast majority of the game, gameplay will consist of sitting on your throne and handling applicants and subjects of all sorts and descriptions.
Story (spoilers)
This is the game’s strongest suit. The story follows the game’s protagonist, Eryk, a ruler of a Kingdom known as Davern, which he rules from his castle at Grevno, and his family of 4 (his wife, Aurelea, and his three daughters; Lorsulia, Asalia and Cedani). The game’s prologue is a plunge into a very quick series of events, of which the consequences are going to resume until the end of the game. The major backdrop of the game is Eryk and his wife’s past oath, that they made 13 years ago under the threat of death, to a roadside ruffian named Beyran, from a land known as Radovia. The King, whose wife was under the mercy of this bandit’s knife, swore the hand of their first daughter to Beyran. The details, edges and contents of these events are somewhat abstract outside of this, but this cursed Eryk and his wife, Aurelea, that they will have only daughters for their entire life so long as they don’t uphold their oath to Beyran and wed him their eldest daughter. Eryk agreed to the bandit’s terms to save his life, thinking that he will never have to face their consequences. In this game, Eryk comes to face those consequences.
The story, not to my taste, is also very referent to ASOIAF/Game of Thrones. The writing, character tropes and atmosphere is similar to those. Eryk as a character greatly resembles Ned Stark, his wife greatly resembles Catelyn, the first antagonist is a somewhat bad imitation of Joffrey Baratheon, and so on. Though the story takes some bizarre twists towards its end.
The writing holds up somewhat with its set of intrigues in the first general act of the game, but towards the end of the game it unfortunately starts to fall apart and you have several days with paltry story progression and little interaction with your family members, or absurdly calm reactions by your family members towards significant incidents, your retainers whom you will spend so much time in the first act trying to recruit to your army will be consigned to the background, never to reappear.
Choices
Yes, Your Grace is a text-rich, choices-matter type of game with a rather simple game loop; you are a monarch of a fantasy kingdom, every day starts with you sitting on your throne in your court and listening to the woes, pleas and the misdoings of the applicants, envoys, petitioners, merchants and the people of the world. Whether they be locals from your villages pleading for support due to a poor harvest or a drugs merchant attempting to sell you an addictive substance called “The Oracle Dust”. Your kingdom operates on two material resources; gold and grain. Both are used as currencies, either to help your subjects, to invest in your kingdom, or to improve the fortifications of your castle. Sometimes, you will have an important objective where you have to hoard an adequate level of grain and gold. In addition to purchases, grain is necessary for the upkeep of your army. Reaching 0 in either will result in a game-over. Procuring these two is not a symmetrical task and you can come up with out of the box solution or un-ethical paths like investing in oracle dust cartels to procure gold or appealing to your subjects. You have several subordinates at your disposal, including the 3 most important ones: A General, a Hunter and a Witch. These agents can carry out tasks for you around the kingdom. They can solve problems for you, where you might have to spend gold or food in their stead to dispense of those issues, but they take turns to carry out their tasks, so timing is important with dispatching them.
Do your choices truly matter?
Most small cases and supplicants will offer a diverse set of branches, but unfortunately once you finish the game and upon replaying it, you will realize that in almost all cases there’s a clear winner choice that’s better than the rest, picking any other choices is often counterproductive, so there’s freedom to win or lose rather than freedom to go different paths with multitudes of trade-offs. Some major story turns will happen regardless of player choice, unfortunately.
Verdict; 7/10
Steam User 50
My lesbian barbarian daughter and my other daughter who commands the loyalty of bears will long be with my elder god born manchild. A win for all.
Steam User 51
It's a gritty, gut-wrenching journey through the highs and lows of war and revenge.
I made the tough call to sacrifice an ally to save my kingdom from barbarians, and it seemed like the right move at the time. But when that ally turned around and betrayed me, killing my daughter and amassing an army of 5,000, I knew I was in deep sh*t.
I scrounged for every last resource, but it was a losing battle. My wife and son died, and all that was left was my burning desire for revenge. I didn't give a damn about my castle at that point, I just wanted to put that scumbag in the ground.
The siege that followed was brutal, with my 299 men pitted against an army of 5,000. We fought tooth and nail, using every trick in the book to stay alive. It was a battle of attrition, and it seemed like the odds were against us.
But I never gave up. I was willing to do whatever it took to see my enemy fall, even if it meant waiting years for the perfect moment to strike. And when I finally got my revenge, it was sweeter than anything I had ever tasted before.
If you're looking for a game that will test your mettle and make you question your morals, this is it. Just be prepared to lose everything, including your mind, in the pursuit of victory.
Steam User 34
Yes, Your Grace is an odd object. Its primary aim is to really make you feel like the sovereign of a small medieval/fantasy kingdom, in that you always have a hundred things demanding your attention and you can never really get as hands-on with them as you'd sometimes like, but instead must work through other people and base your decisions on often-limited information. In that goal, I would say it is mostly successful.
The gameplay is sort of a turn-based life sim/light management/roleplaying hybrid, wherein you have to choose each week (a week is a turn) where to send your limited workers, meet petitioners and choose whether to help them, and engage in some peripheral dialogue which builds the story, characters, and relationships, before ending the week and doing it all over again.
Your goal is to maximize several resources and make sure they don't run out completely, because if they do, it's game over. It's an engaging and addictive little mix that had me saying "just one more turn" even though I often felt the game did not give me enough to go on in making my gameplay decisions--but again, that's part of the point. This game is partly a roleplaying game, and you're roleplaying a harried king who must work through a fog of advisors and agents to get anything done.
The game has been criticized by some reviewers for railroading you into one specific storyline with few choices of real consequence to the plot, and this is true, but I think being too harsh on it for that is somewhat missing the point. You get the sense playing the game that part of what the developers were trying to convey is that an ostensibly powerful person like a king may not necessarily have as much agency as he thinks; the scope of realistic choices he can make are somewhat limited, and bad outcomes are sometimes unavoidable.
I don't have a problem with that per se, but I do think I see the primary pain point that rubs some reviewers the wrong way. During the game's first act, you're asked to deal with a difficult situation involving one of the king's three beloved daughters, and it feels like a situation where there actually should be more choices available, but you're forced into just one. Without spoiling too much, that one choice leads the story down a pretty grim path, and it's a little frustrating.
I also want to mention that, for a game in which most of the major supporting characters are women, the way they are used by the story rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. The story pretty transparently uses them to tug on the player's heartstrings, and this can put them into some sickening circumstances within which they have no agency. The comparisons to the work of George R.R. Martin are inevitable, but the level of care he takes to frequently give the women in his stories choices and agency even in dire circumstances is usually not present here.
There is one situation you can encounter where a character is basically going to do what she wants, and your choice is whether to be supportive of her decision or not. The game could have used more of that, and also could have used more dialogue options where you ask the characters what they want and are allowed to respect their wishes.
You could argue that, being sort of history-adjacent, this is a world where women are often treated as objects and that's just expected. Yet the game is not exactly that interested in historical accuracy, often includes fantasy elements, and itself sometimes eschews that attitude. So I can't really accept that excuse, especially when some topics are just not treated with thoughtfully at all.
Yet despite all of that, there are things I loved about the game's story. Each of the daughters has a distinctive and relatable personality. The king himself is allowed to show weakness, and the player really feels the burden placed upon him by his circumstances. There are plenty of quiet, memorable character moments that really connect you to these little faceless pixel-people. Major emotional story beats are treated with the gravity they deserve. The game is sometimes funny, too, with one rather-amusing throughline that pays out in spades.
I just wish a few things had been handled a little better, and yes, a little more choice and consequence would have been welcome.
Overall, I can recommend Yes, Your Grace as an imperfect-but-interesting package that mostly achieves its goals. If you like this sort of lightweight management/roleplaying/story-driven experience, give it a shot and it will probably grab you, even if it ruffles your feathers a bit along the way, as it did mine.
Steam User 83
I've seen reviews saying "the game has heavy themes" or "marriages are forced".
THE GAME IS LITERALLY ABOUT A MEDIEVAL WORLD WHICH HAS A KINGDOM IN IT AND WE ARE PLAYING AS ITS KING.
Like haven't you read history or other medieval contents about royal families?
Sorry to tell you but medieval setting is even much more cruel than this, you should actually be thankful that this game doesn't have slaves.
The game was just trying to be realistic with its theme and you're down grading it because of it?
Now I don't have any business about the rights or wrongs about medieval rules and culture, but like it or not it was a part of humans history.
You have no right to call the game bad because of its realistic approach to its theme.
If you don't like the theme or better to be called genre, then just don't buy the game and don't play it.
Steam User 30
no merchant, i will not give you 18 gold for 2 strands of wheat, damn minecraft villager wannabe
no mercenary dude, i will not pay you 22 gold, stop coming back this is the 14th time
ok yes i'll take some oracle dust that shit sounds fire (ok so that was crack)
wait fuck war is next week can we reschedule