King of Dragon Pass is one of those amazing and unique indy titles that only a small studio could have made. At it’s core it’s a strategy title where you manage a germanic-like clan through it’s trials and tribulations, try to lump some other clans into a tribe and drive that tribe into a kingdom. While it is a strategy game with resource management and area control, it’s main goodness is a story component where random events play out over the course of years based on choices made at each point that the story is presented. If you take in some refugees for instance, it could trigger certain (random) stories where some of the new women are stealing the men from your original clan group, pissing off the incumbent women and this will have to be resolved somehow, if you didn’t take the refugees, it could path out to a different set of random stories. Given there are a mess of these stories going on at once and they all path, that’s a huge tree of story goodness to experience. It’s a given that it’s never the same game twice, but what A-sharp did was create a game with that most elusive of all elements: soul. From the way battles are managed to the aging of your clan elders to the myriad of paintings and images that go along with the stories, the game just oozes out soul from every pore.
So why bring this up now as it came out in ’99 and this game has been lost in the sands of time for awhile, at least in purchasable for? It’s coming to iOS in September! While not available on the iPad (which would be ideal), it’s going to be out on the iTouch and iPhone for what looks like OS4/5.
