The Perfect Skyrim Replacement for Right Now

I love Skyrim. I love returning to the spine-tingling haze of ’90s first-person games like Doom, Quake, and Myst. But what I really love is a modern game that feels like a lost relic from that era, not a nostalgic imitation but something that might have actually existed.

Queen’s Domain pulls off that illusion spectacularly, embracing the creepy, low- aesthetic of FromSoftware’s King’s Field while building something far more ambitious. Instead of just paying homage to the cult-classic RPG series, it feels like a lost installment, unearthed decades later and somehow better than I could have imagined.

Maybe that’s because modern technology has allowed the game design veterans behind Freshly Baked Games to turn their debut title into a modern experience worthy of AAA games. When your warrior prince character arrives stranded on an island crawling with bloodthirsty critters, you quickly realize every corner of the island — its relics, its tunnels, its mountains, its barely visible ledges — is explorable. I will suck it up and deal with the minor load-time issues required to drop me into a retro-fantasy open world where I am constantly stumbling into the unexpected, because there is no part of this map left undesigned. Through economical terraforming and high-caliber level design, every second and every inch of Queen’s Domain is playable and threatening.

Queen’s Domain requires no prior knowledge of King’s Field, but for those completely in the dark about FromSoft’s history, the studio’s games have never been walks in the park. The danger is real, the stakes feel high, and Queen’s Domain immediately wallops anyone who thinks they have a handle on how to navigate the “easy” creepy-crawlers littering the opening patches of grass. You are truly at level 0 when you wash ashore on the mysterious Isle of Neasied, and the few surviving soldiers you meet early on will be devoured before lending much help.

For my first hour, it really was just me and my sword, figuring out how much might was required to survive an encounter with a Ratty Bug (a rat version of a ladybug, naturally). I was killed and killed and killed again as Forest Eyes blasted me with lasers out of nowhere and centipede-like Chilopodas ramped up the speed of multi-threat encounters. The weapons in Queen’s Domain are fairly standard, coming in lightweight, heavy, slashing, and piercing variants, many later imbued with a touch of magic. The twist is that, on top of your own stats, the weapons level up too. Used enough times, your rusty sword may transform into a deadlier blade.

That took some grinding on my end, and plenty of swift retreats to the scant save points in the early areas. Queen’s Domain bifurcates saving and “resting,” which renews your life at the cost of repopulating the map with enemies. Players can really figure out their own rhythm for conquering the early challenges. And did I mention they’re really challenging? I was screaming in fury at my umpteenth demise, and screaming even more when I finally jumped through all the hoops to reach my first boss, a towering skeleton warrior who knocked me back to square one — and the game’s first save point. Brutal. Wildly entertaining.

The difficulty of Queen’s Domain ebbs and flows as you power up and obtain increasingly heavy-metal-album-cover weaponry, but the oddities you encounter only escalate. The team of two at Freshly Baked Games has the same doodler imagination as FromSoft’s creature designers, but a lower bar for “realism,” meaning there are tons of whacked-out creatures around every turn, from venom-spewing Big Mouth Billy Bass to killer hardcover books to wicked gremlins and beasties so indescribable they could only exist in the graphical vocabulary of 1996.

It’s possible the labyrinthine map of Queen’s Domain creates an optical illusion of just how much danger is packed into the game. One minute you may be trekking across a field, only to dive into a hole and discover that a pillar you passed several save points ago wasn’t just scenery, but a reward-hiding platform you could only reach later in the game. The map is constantly crisscrossing into itself, and the early discovery of the “Legendary Holy Sword Endu” allows you to fly across sections you assumed were nothing more than background scenery.

As a precision experience, the combat is, in a way, refreshingly haphazard. Like a Soulslike, the big bosses demand a certain amount of pattern recognition and coordination. Other times, a horde of oversized mosquitoes swooping at you while a sea-spitting barnacle launches water blobs your way means the only “right” way to fight is to zigzag around like a madman, flailing with a fully powered-up sword. (Pro tip: You can charge your hits, and you won’t survive without learning how to do so. And no, the game won’t teach you that.) The chaos of survival, paired with the limited resources you can acquire along the game’s unspoken missions, dramatically increases the fun of Queen’s Domain for my sadomasochistic, Skyrim-craving brain.

I am “over 10 hours” into Queen’s Domain (thank you, Nintendo, for not telling me the honest truth). By all accounts, I’m just getting started (probably because I sucked at the beginning, but don’t shame me). The game was made by RPG masters who know exactly when to hit you with the dopamine rush of a collectible, a new melee technique, an XP level-up, or access to a place you absolutely do not want to be in your current state but have complete permission to explore as you see fit. There is a well early in the game that, if you dare to break through its boarded-up opening, reveals… Lovecraftian horror. If only it was just one manticore.

While we all wait patiently for The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel — and we’ll likely be waiting another two years — Queen’s Domain, in its ultimate ode to pre-Dark Souls FromSoft, has reimagined fantasy-action traversal in a retro vocabulary. I’ll be honest: I want to be playing right now instead of telling you about it.