Brave at Night’s 2020 kingdom management RPG, Yes, Your Grace, didn’t have the most in-depth kingdom management mechanics when compared to other entries in the genre. It mostly consisted of answering petitioner requests and balancing these with your limited resources, while also making decisions that would affect the storyline later. What it really thrived on was showing the weight of a crown that lies heavy; it was nigh impossible to make everyone happy, and for every desperate petitioner you helped, there was always one you had to regrettably turn away in order to save resources. On top of this, I was enthralled by the overarching plot which followed King Eryk, ruler of Davern, who learnt all too well the sacrifices that must be made for duty. But on top of this, it was also filled with light-hearted moments and humorous characters and dialogue to help lift the weight off its crushing storyline.
Following directly on from Yes, Your Grace, its sequel, Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall has a similar premise and mechanics, though has tweaked the gameplay quite a bit to make it feel more streamlined. Whereas before we would be handing out our gold, agents, food and other resources directly to petitioners based on what they specified they needed in their requests, and then having to manage these resources into other needs at the end of each week, Snowfall instead uses a weighted system. Here, when a petitioner comes to their ruler with a problem, you can assign any of your two agents who have a set number of actions to the job, and/or you can assign relevant items. As you play, you gather items, mostly by using Resources to explore areas of the kingdom. Based on the category of the petitioner request, for example ‘combat’, you then assign some of these items if they are relevant, for example any weapons you have picked up. Each agent action and item adds a certain number of points to the job, and there’s a required number of points that you need to fill the request’s bar to in order to complete its basic requirements. Or you can spend more to hit a higher target on the bar that will provide more kingdom Prosperity in return. Some of the spaces on the bar may have effects, such as bleeding, so if you assign an agent to this task and they land on that effect, they will lose an action point until you heal them at the end of the week.
Unlike its predecessor where you would then dish out your remaining resources into various causes and services in the kingdom, the end of the week management in Snowfall consists of assigning your Prosperity points, the currency you build from fulfilling petitioner requests, into Gold, Resources or Happiness. You can then use your Gold to pay your agents’ wages so that their action points are replenished for the following week, or purchase items from the market. Keeping your Happiness level from running out is essential; if this bar drops to zero, the threat level to your kingdom will rise and take you one step closer to falling, which is game over. If you decline legitimate petitioner requests, the Happiness level of your kingdom will drop, as well as when you introduce unpopular laws. You can also tax the population to bring in more Gold and Resources, but this will cause its Happiness to decline. At the end of each week, you also use any levels you have built to announce a new law, which will affect what services are available to you and the items, Gold and Resources you gather.
The trick with the management system always comes down to whether you have enough Gold to pay your agents or not – which you won’t most of the time. While Resources are important for exploring the kingdom and fulfilling some main quests associated with that, Gold is what will really impact your ability to fulfill petitioner requests or not. I did prefer the resource management system in the first game. For one, I liked being able to review what services to spend money, food and other resources on at the end of the week; it felt more like I was actually managing a kingdom rather than being managed by the wages of my employees. Especially when some of these employees are family friends who we are sheltering under our roof… it seems strange that they would demand a wage in return for their services when we are already keeping them safe from their enemies. The economy also feels really unbalanced. Even if I maxed out my Prosperity meter, I rarely had enough gold to pay for both of my preferred agents. As you gather more agents over time, you can switch out the ones you can’t afford for another with more action points, but this just really took me out of the immersion. Due to certain elements to the story, I could see why the previous mechanics wouldn’t have worked. But while I do prefer this new weighted system to responding to petitioner requests as it feels more strategy-focused and challenging, I’m not a fan of the end of week management change as it feels way more stripped back while at the same time being infuriatingly unbalanced. This isn’t helped by the fact that, at the end of each chapter, all Gold, Resources and laws you have created will be wiped clean, which is gutting in a management game.
Snowfall also has a serious pacing issue, and while this can also be pinned down to its story, it also doesn’t have a consistent difficulty curve. For one, chapters one and two felt fairly simple and while I did feel strained on my Gold and Resources, I didn’t feel heavily under pressure. This all changed when chapter three hit where, out of nowhere, there was a huge spike in difficulty. Agent wages are far too expensive, even just knocking off five gold each would make them more manageable and I don’t think two agents costing more than a full Prosperity bar is sustainable at all considering we also need to put some Prosperity points into Resources to progress in the main storyline. This isn’t helped by the fact that things will start to snowball in Snowfall (excuse the pun) when they go wrong because all the resources are tied together. After my kingdom fell twice despite restarting with the hind sight that resources would be tough, I ended up lowering the difficulty just to make it through that chapter. But then the following two chapters felt far more relaxed, even after putting the difficulty back up again.
I also felt like the tutorial doesn’t do an amazing job at explaining the values listed under every resource. These basically reflect what category the item is best in and also what agent trait it works best with, which I didn’t work out until two weeks in. This was also a problem that I found when trying to progress in the main quest; I felt like I often wasn’t given enough information to know what I needed to do next and this was something I would usually end up working out a few weeks into the current chapter – which is not ideal when Snowfall relies heavily on you balancing your resources out between petitioner requests and main quest requirements.
One minor quality of life improvement that could be made to improve Snowfall’s gameplay is adding a confirmation message before moving onto the next week. Annoyingly, you can’t go back once you’ve hit the button to move on, and I accidentally pressed this button more than once while playing the game on Steamdeck. There were also a couple of sequences, usually before a large quest at the end of a chapter, where we had to assign agents to certain tasks as preparation. For some reason, we’re unable to review their strengths and weaknesses again as a reminder which was really annoying – especially when I hadn’t had some of these agents in employment long enough to be familiar with them. A similar occurrence happened during the build up to the final battle where certain actions would increase or decrease the number of action points each agent had leading up to this battle. Again, for some reason we couldn’t see how many each agent had in total until the battle had actually commenced, so I ended up having agents with no action points going in with me in the final mission.
Somehow, even the petitioners feel less weighted than the original game. This time, they feel a lot more randomized, which became more evident when I would sometimes end up with the same request again but the NPC would have a different appearance. This, again, heavily broke the immersion. It’s also a stark contrast to the petitioners in the original game who would often be returning characters. Sometimes if you declined a petitioner, they would return to reveal that the problem had gotten worse and would now be more expensive to sort out. And while this is also present in Snowfall, the randomized nature of the NPCs makes these encounters feel less genuine.
Snowfall begins with a cinematic recap of the first game, though evidently not thorough enough for my memory as when we got to the part where we could import our choices, I had absolutely no idea what I had got up to in the first game. I highly recommend replaying the first game before trying out Snowfall, or at least watching a more detailed recap of the choices available and the story events, because the game relies very heavily on the player having this knowledge as it starts right where the previous game left off.
After the events of the first game, Davern is still under threat by its enemies. While facing off against this threat, Eryk is also dealing with problems amongst his family, including the mysterious ailment that his son and heir is suffering from. While the stakes are higher in Snowfall on paper and I loved the stronger focus on Aurelea, the queen of Davern who I thought was a really strong character in the first game, the storyline doesn’t feel as emotionally impactful. While I got a ‘just one more week’ kick out of the gameplay despite its problems, I just had no interest in the main plot with its many enemies and a bunch of character side plots which mostly consisted of clicking through dialogue. There are some dream sequences with Eryk which were definitely the weakest points to the story. They were just so painfully boring, happened too often, and seemingly had no actual relation to what was going on in the real world. The majority of the excitement happens in the first and second chapters. After that, most of the story progresses off screen, and we receive updates via letters. While we sit around, twiddling our thumbs, characters will appear discussing all the exciting things that have happened without our presence. It doesn’t help that our choices don’t have as many unexpected outcomes or real time impact. In fact, because I wasn’t feeling the direct impact of my choices, half the resulting consequences that were revealed to me in the epilogue cards just caused confusion, as I had no idea what I had done wrong to end up with this result.
Even Eryk’s children, who I loved in the first game, came off as a real annoyance in Snowfall. This is mainly due to the fact that they are a consistent liability to the king. While kids may be kids, the actions of the children in Snowfall actually have direct negative impacts to the situation he’s found himself in, and it’s extremely difficult to find them likeable in this circumstance – especially when these consequences are a result of them doing something they’ve been explicitly told not to do. There was a similar scenario in the first game, but it was humorous, and an accident. These instances are deliberate and completely ignorant of the situation that’s currently ongoing. This isn’t just a case of ‘don’t run with scissors’, this is children doing stupid things and putting the kingdom at risk because of it. This especially applies to his middle child, Asalia, who is clearly going through some serious teenage mood swings and treats literally everyone around her like dirt on the bottom of her shoe. While I knew why this was happening, I felt like the story didn’t give us enough time with her to find reconciliation before she’s gallivanting off again after causing us some serious trouble and being awful to her mother.
But Snowfall‘s biggest disappointment in its story is the ending. It’s awful. I got a bad ending, so mine was shorter than those who complete a specific side quest to get a better one. But even so, it ends so abruptly, and felt like it was missing a chapter. When the title card came up at the end, I genuinely thought my game had bugged out again as it couldn’t possibly just end there. But it did. It felt really unemotional, especially considering what had been at stake during this mission.
While all of these add up to a mediocre sequel, what really killed off my enjoyment of Snowfall were the bugs. These got progressively worse as I played the game, starting off with not being able to interact with the UI for whatever reason, to the game repeatedly freezing during scene transitions and requiring a restart – often meaning I lost progress. After the game’s disappointing ending, it even froze after the credits had played out! Characters will also have an exclamation mark above their head when they have a side plot to progress, or a blue question mark when they have a new conversation available. These were very bugged during the latter half of the game, with question marks appearing over characters who seemingly had nothing to say – or maybe their dialogue was just bugged. Because of this, and I suspect some characters were also not showing an exclamation mark when they should have been, I missed out on a few character side plots which were pivotal to these characters’ endings in the epilogue, despite my efforts to make sure I covered them all.
Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall was a massively disappointing sequel to a game that I really love. While the developers have confirmed that the bugs are due to the project being too large for a smaller team, no amount of bug fixing will resolve the deeper issues existing throughout all facets of the game. This felt like a project that needed a lot more time put into it to perfect. It needed more depth to both the gameplay and writing, as what currently exists is an ambitious project with little to no backing behind it. While I did still enjoy it quite a bit, it still somehow does everything the first game did, but worse.
Jess played Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall on PC with a provided review copy.
