Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 continues the misadventures of Heinrich von Skalitz, the son of a 15th-century Bohemian blacksmith and knightly Laddy Lad, who attempts to recover his murdered father’s sword from a real-life nobleman. In the prologue, you take on the role of the well-equipped and fully upgraded bodyguard of Sir Hans Capon – an annoying jerk and your bosom friend from the 2018 game. You are on your way to deliver a message to a distant lord in the hope that he sides with your own lord in the ongoing civil war. But plot intervenes in the form of some suspiciously familiar bandits who slaughter your entourage and turn Henry and Sir Hans into a pair of shirtless runaways.

Along the way, Henry is shot at by arrows and loses all of his progression points, as well as his endgame armor and weapons, as he progresses through a series of embedded narrative tutorials and dazed flashbacks that fill you in on the events of the original Deliverance. A few hours later he wakes up on a bed that doesn’t belong to him, covered in blood and dirt. It’s basically the first 24 hours of the typical British stag do. All that’s missing is a tattoo in an unpleasant place and a traffic cone full of sick people.

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Things continue to go wrong – at least as far as my save game is concerned. Henry and Sir Hans make their way to a castle on a hill, but are not allowed in because no one recognizes Sir Hans when he is dressed in sackcloth lifted from a corpse. Then they are locked in the stocks after Sir Hans has a fight in a tavern – again because no one recognizes Sir Hans when he looks like a bale of hay being rolled through a cesspool. The bachelor party energy is definitely waning at this point. It suggests the more adult nature of the British stag do, where everyone secretly hates being there but feels they have to adhere to standards. Waheeey, bois, amirite? Wahey! Ah, I remember this bar. It used to be a Woolworths and for 30p you could get a double Milky Bar. Comrades, gentlemen, I’m actually a little sad. Can’t we just go back to the Airbnb and watch Friends?

Eventually, Henry and Sir Hans have a heated argument over Sir Hans’s tendency to hit people who don’t acknowledge his position, causing Sir Hans to storm off like the insufferable blue-blooded loser he definitely is. Henry is left penniless and triumphantly abandoned by the inventory on a bright summer morning – and it’s finally time for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. How will you get out of this dire situation? What kind of Henry will you be? A wandering thief? A silver-tongued scholar? A skilled swordsman? A good Christian? An effeminate player? An unpredictable bum in fool’s slippers?

The answer is probably all of the above and more, depending on the situation or task. Deliverance 2 is once again a free-form historical open-world role-playing game that experiments with systems and practices social mobility like no other, although you basically rely on your expandable character stats. The new features include the ability to switch between three clothing options as desired. This is, I hope, the basis for such chameleonic shenanigans as kicking guards while draped in burlap and then transmogrifying them into full plate armor like Superman emerging from a phone booth.

For now, however, after five hours of play, my Henry is a cozy and peaceful flower picker. He and I have long since forgotten about reconciling with Sir Hans, let alone avenging Henry’s father. We stroll together through the undergrowth of the Bohemian Paradise region, let our gaze wander over festive root banks and follow the giggle of the water to the sparkle of hidden streams. We search for clusters of eyebright and belladonna amid dreamy forest lights and identify plants by stem, leaf shape and color using a lovingly illustrated herbarium.

Every now and then we stop and ask ourselves whether we should experiment with consuming an herb to find out its properties or whether we should seek the opinion of a pharmacist. Ah, but that would mean going into town, which might involve a reunion with that silly Sir Hans, and that’s what it is Pretty Under the canopy, amirite guys? So calming. Henry occasionally gets hungry, but as luck would have it, there are many cabbage fields on the edge of this special forest area. Occasionally there’s also a bandit who’ll murder us outright – like the original game, it really comes down to wearing the right combinations of armor, and a difference in equipment quality is audible in the clatter of the blade on the plate. But enemies are easy to escape if you’re already roaming through the undergrowth: just look for the investigating rabbit icon at the top of the HUD.

Overall, Deliverance 2’s interface design is quite restrained and elegant. The menus are perhaps a little heavy-handed: they’re made up of soft leather panels, ornamental calligraphy, and woodwork, and the insistence on materiality also (apparently) forces the developers to simulate the friction of shuffling pieces of fabric and wood. The map screen is a painted wartable hung with clouds of starch paper, and the codex beetles are full of medieval trivia.

There are some familiar HUD elements in the form of a horizontal compass with quest waypoints, as well as an essential stance indicator around your cursor in battle. Like the first game, you need to aim your weapon to deflect attacks, and reading the NPC animations underneath the iconography takes practice. But the game is careful not to overwrite its own geography to the point where it appears cosmetic. For example, you have to crouch down near the ground to trigger the pop-up for a Gathering Weed, which means you have to spot it first.

Sir Hans and his antics aside, sticking to the woods means I’m avoiding the details of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s historical setting, although I think my expanded taxonomy of herbs is in line with Andreas Inderwildi’s analysis of the game’s representation of 2018 is about politics. My haphazard foraging is arguably part of what Andreas described as a tendency to view history as “an accumulation of facts,” both comparable to and through the accumulation of equipment and loot in an Elder Scrolls-style RPG this is actively implemented.

As he further argues in this article, the “realist” conception of history as a puzzle to be solved, a lost entity to be inventoried, does not in fact provide a reliable measure of a medieval “world” made up of scattered and scattered parts eroded documents, competing perspectives and accidental or intentional misinformation. In fact, the quantitative bookishness of such a historical recreation may only obscure or sanitize the choices that go into, for example, portraying other ethnicities as murderous invaders.

I’m far too early in my Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 career to give any sort of comprehensive assessment here. My Henry doesn’t even have shoes at the moment. He hasn’t taken a bath since the bandit attacks, which is another reason he doesn’t go to villages much anymore – like in the original game, you can wash his face and clothes at horse troughs, but if you want to impress anyone halfway if you’re noble and pass the associated conversation tests, you want to be appropriately perfumed. But so far, Deliverance 2’s ideas about history as a practice and Bohemia in the 15th century are particularly consistent with the first game.

In particular, it fits well into the concept of a medieval society in which women are ornaments, spectators, indulgent confidants and objects of lust. The first time you see a woman in the world of Deliverance 2, outside of the intro cinematics, it’s part of an Ovidian stealth tutorial in which you and Hans sneak up on some bathers. The first female character you have a real conversation with is a healer; The second is the healer’s daughter, who promptly takes on the role of Henry’s bedside therapist.

I don’t think that’s all there is to Deliverance 2’s depictions of women – I’ve had reasonably non-lustful conversations with at least three, one of whom is admittedly a brothel owner – but it is the framework we’re working with here a lot of Boys Will Be Boys and Oh You (Hands On Hips). I’m curious to see whether that will change. The beginning of Deliverance 2 is dominated by the chemistry between Henry and Sir Hans, with Sir Hans acting as the uncompromising piece of shit that both enables Henry’s rudeness and makes you feel better about not being him The bad. But there are traces of something more exciting.

In the first game, Henry’s relatively simple birth was a central plot theme, as is familiar from many medieval romance novels. This continues into Deliverance 2: aside from the energy of the bachelor party, the opening argument with Sir Hans is a playable commentary on how clothes and appearance are more important than the color of your blood.

At one point Sir Hans brilliantly outlines the divinely appointed distinction between peasantry, nobility and clergy, but then stumbles over the question of exactly which category Henry belongs to. Maybe it’s just the usual ludonnarrative dissonance, but I like the idea of ​​a historical fable about figuring out the class affiliation of a character who is “classless” in the RPG sense and is able to move between the two depending on the occasion roles to slip.

With Sir Hans out of the picture, perhaps I can reinvent Henry as a kind of insufferably precocious proto-feminist. Of course, this means I have to stop poisoning him with random wild mushrooms, but I’m willing to make that sacrifice. Be sure to keep an eye out for my full review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in a few weeks.