Kingdom Incremental

Introduction

Kingdom Incremental pitches itself as a satirical twist on the city-building incremental: grow a settlement from a single homestead into a sprawling kingdom, tax your citizens, expand across the map, then burn the whole thing down for a prestige bonus and start again, stronger. Developed by Royal Goose Studios and entering Steam Early Access on 24 August 2023, its concept genuinely stands out within the genre — buildings occupy real, visible positions on a map you explore, rather than existing as an abstract list of unlocks. This review reads all 41 of the game's reviews, 38 of them in English, and finds a lifetime Mostly Negative 34.1% score that reflects something more specific and more concerning than the usual mixed reception for a rough Early Access build: a game whose developer appears to have stopped working on it almost entirely, within days of asking players to pay for it.

A concept worth crediting

Before detailing why this review can't recommend buying it, it's worth being fair about what works. Several reviewers, including some who ultimately don't recommend the game, single out the core idea as genuinely interesting — one writes that they "love the concept of buildings actually being somewhere as opposed to a" typical abstract list, and the visual presentation and satirical humour draw specific, repeated praise even from critical reviews. The prestige mechanic, framed literally as burning your kingdom to the ground and rebuilding, is a clever thematic hook for a genre where resets are usually just a number multiplier with no narrative dressing. None of that is in dispute across this review's sample — the idea itself is sound, and more than one reviewer explicitly says they wanted to like it.

A launch that never got a second chance

What sinks the game is entirely traceable and verifiable rather than a matter of taste. This review's negative sample describes, consistently, a buggy, under-explained Early Access build: confusing tutorial pacing that leaves players unsure whether stalled progress is a bug or intended design, an "auto build" feature multiple reviewers describe as non-functional, and game-breaking issues arriving within four to six hours for several accounts. One reviewer sums up the tutorial problem specifically: "It tells you what to do but doesn't tell you how much of it you are supposed to do." None of that alone would be unusual for a day-one Early Access release — what makes it serious is what happened, or didn't, afterward.

Checking the developer's own news feed settles the question rather than leaving it as reviewer speculation: Royal Goose Studios posted exactly four updates, the last dated 29 August 2023, five days after the game's Early Access launch. Nothing has followed in the three years since. Reviewers posted across that entire span independently confirm the silence from the inside — one from November 2023 reports "no updates on Steam" despite a pinned roadmap of promised changes; one from January 2024 calls it "a blatant money grab" citing the same lack of developer communication; one from March 2025 reports the identical broken state, "hasnt been patched in 2 years and is completely broken." That's not four isolated complaints about a slow patch cadence — it's a consistent record of the same abandonment, observed independently by different players eighteen months apart.

What the numbers confirm

Steam's own achievement data corroborates the picture without needing to trust any single review's framing. The earliest milestones — founding a settlement, unlocking basic buildings — clear 90%+ of the tracked population, roughly what you'd expect from any incremental's opening minutes. From there the curve doesn't taper, it collapses: mid-tier city-growth achievements fall into the single digits, and the endgame tier sits at a uniform 0.4%. Read alongside reviewer reports of game-breaking bugs within the first several hours, that's consistent with a population that mostly can't progress past an early wall, rather than one that simply lost interest gradually.

Final Verdict

Kingdom Incremental has a real idea worth respecting — buildings with physical presence, a satirical prestige hook, presentation multiple critics still compliment — wrapped around an Early Access build its own developer appears to have walked away from within a week of taking payment for it, and never returned to in the three years since. That's a different, more serious problem than "needs more polish," and this review can't in good conscience recommend a NZ$14.75 purchase against it. If Royal Goose Studios ever resumes development, the underlying concept deserves a second look; until there's evidence of that happening, treat the store page as a historical artefact rather than an active product.

Players drawn to the idea of a kingdom that grows and changes under real, visible management, but who want a developer still actively building on it, should look elsewhere in this library before considering this one — Wanderer's own ongoing development is one such option.