Developed and Published By: Inti Creates
Category: Action
Release Date: 04.23.26
Price: $14.99
*Game Download Code graciously provided for the purpose of review
Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster is a quirky little game about rebuilding a fallen kingdom with the help of the Fairy of Time. It’s a very simple game that blends strategy, visual novel, and 2D side scrolling with RPG and town management mechanics. You pick one of four classes and begin your adventure where your chosen hero visits the Kingdom of Almacia, only to find out that it’s been sent to the future and has fallen into ruin. You learn that humans and fairies have aided each other for centuries, but most have disappeared.
So the King puts you in charge of everything. Literally. He gives you the rights to rebuild the castle and town any way you see fit, and puts complete faith in your ability to restore the Kingdom to its former glory. There’s a lot of story dumped in the first 15 minutes along with some great character designs and visuals. But once the opening is done, you’re on your own for the most part. While I did have fun with the experience overall, I did have quite a few issues.
The character I chose to play as was the Alchemist, which might not have been the best choice at the start. He throws flasks that damage enemies and does different effects based on the type of flask. But he throws them up in the air so they arc towards the enemy. This made it difficult to hit enemies, especially ones that were moving, because I could never nail where the flask was going to land. This forced me to grind a lot at the start so that I could level up my attack power a lot. That way, fewer attacks would be needed to defeat an enemy.
Changing flasks was also a pain. Changing from one to another requires a few extra button presses and a couple seconds. Sometimes I’d have to change flasks while enemies were attacking. The game doesn’t pause when you’re switching flasks, so you still get hit in the time it takes to swap the flask. Because of this, I found myself sticking to the main explosion attack and just spamming that over and over with brute force. But once I was strong enough, I thought the rest of the game was rather fun.
The game is broken into two gameplay loops. The first is your standard dungeon crawling experience. Each dungeon is a 2D sidscroller and utilizes multiple floors and areas with a bunch of enemies on each one. This side of the game revolves around taking and completing a variety of quests. As you level up, you get stat boosts and can unlock a bunch of useful skills.There isn’t really any variety here because they all require that you beat all the enemies in an area to proceed. But doing so gets you a bunch of money and resources.
You use your newly acquired money and resources to build and upgrade various buildings in your little town area. You start with a castle, and placing various buildings around it will give you permanent buffs to your stats. But space is limited, so you have to be strategic with what you build and where you place it. It’s quite bare bones, but I had fun with the town management side of the game.
Should you play the game? I had fun with the combat side of gameplay once I was strong enough that the flasks didn’t matter. But the other classes use different mechanics. The other combat mechanics might be more appealing to some players. The town management side is good but very limited. The story is a tiny but shallow because the game is mostly just quests and grinding, but that means the entire game can be a pretty quick experience.
Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster is not a bad game, the combat side should be enough to keep anyone interested for a few hours. If the game was priced at $40 to $60, I’d definitely say to avoid it, but for $15, it’s not a bad pickup for the amount of content you’ll get.
6/10