Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs

The pitch

Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs casts you as Kay, a deposed prince stripped of his family's land and title, setting out to rebuild both by recruiting a growing cast of allies, managing a small kingdom between missions, and fighting turn-based tactical battles in dungeons and border skirmishes. It's a small, distinctly indie production -- Kickstarter-funded, developed and self-published by Pixelated Milk -- that arrived as a full release on 18 May 2017, with no Early Access period. Two small paid DLC packs followed after launch, but the base game stands as a complete, self-contained campaign.

Structurally it's an unusual blend: tactical combat on a grid, a kingdom-building layer where completed missions and recruited characters expand your capital, and lengthy text-adventure-style social scenes where dialogue choices build relationships with your party. Several reviewers single out that combination specifically, describing the game as successfully being three different kinds of game at once rather than one system wearing another's skin.

What virtually everyone agrees on

Reading through Regalia's reviews, the writing and cast come up as a strength constantly, and almost without dissent. Reviewers who don't recommend the game overall still routinely open with some version of "the writing is genuinely funny" or "the characters are the best part." One reviewer with over 40 hours logged specifically credits the characters with making the whole package work, calling the writing self-aware and well-observed rather than generically comedic-fantasy. The art -- portraits, monster designs, backgrounds -- draws similarly consistent praise, including from reviewers focused mainly on the game's flaws. For a small, Kickstarter-scale studio, that level of consensus on the creative side is a real achievement, and it's the throughline that explains why the game still sits at Mostly Positive despite a genuinely long list of specific technical complaints.

The specific things that drag it down

What keeps Regalia from a higher score isn't one big issue -- it's a cluster of smaller, very specifically documented ones that recur across nearly a decade of reviews rather than clustering around launch week and fading. Crashes at the end of battles show up repeatedly, with reviewers describing having to replay fights they'd already won because the game crashed on the results screen -- a frustrating failure mode precisely because it strikes after the difficult part is over. Save system limitations are called out just as consistently; one 2023 review calls them "unacceptable" outright, and the complaint spans years, suggesting it was a structural choice rather than a bug that got patched.

The turn-limit on many battles is a more design-level complaint: several reviewers who otherwise like tactical RPGs say Regalia's hard cap on turns per fight works against the genre's usual appeal -- patient, considered positioning -- by forcing a faster pace than the combat system is built to reward. And the RNG complaints are unusually well-documented for a Steam review corpus: one long-form negative review lays out a specific, countable grievance -- attacks with a stated 90%-plus hit chance missing five times across four consecutive dungeons, spread across several different characters -- the kind of specific, falsifiable detail that suggests a real distribution problem rather than one player's bad luck talking.

What the achievement data suggests

Global achievement completion shows the shape you'd expect from a game people start enthusiastically and don't all finish. Early milestones -- the first battle, early codex entries, the first text adventure -- sit at 68-80% completion. Chapter-based story achievements drop steadily: Chapter 1 around 40%, Chapter 2 around 30%. By the far end, character-specific relationship achievements and what appears to be an endgame-tied achievement (named for Excalibur) sit at 4-7%. That's a meaningful but not extreme drop-off for a tactical RPG with a genuine midgame commitment, and it's consistent with the review pattern of real enthusiasm meeting real friction -- crashes, saves, turn limits -- that wears some players down before the story resolves.

Value

At NZ$24.79 with no discount active at the time of checking, Regalia sits at a reasonable price for a 20-40+ hour tactical RPG with genuinely distinctive writing, provided a buyer goes in aware of the technical friction documented above. It has had no significant post-launch support since its two DLC packs, which is typical for a small Kickstarter-funded studio moving on to other projects, and nine years of steady Mostly Positive reviews suggest the core experience -- crashes and save friction included -- has remained essentially the same the whole time rather than improving or degrading further.

Verdict

Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs is a good example of a game whose creative ambition outran its technical execution, and whose review corpus has stayed remarkably consistent about exactly where that gap sits. The writing and cast are a real, durable strength that reviewers across nine years keep independently arriving at. The crashes, save limitations, turn caps and documented RNG issues are just as durable a weakness, named in almost identical terms by reviewers years apart. For players willing to save constantly and tolerate real rough edges in exchange for a tactical RPG with more personality than most, it remains a worthwhile, if imperfect, pick.