Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Let’s take the elephant gun to that particularly large pachyderm in the room immediately – Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a game with a hell of a lot that’s problematic about it. Arguments about people of colour not featuring are backed up by the notion that there would be a very small chance of meeting a travelling merchant from a far-off land in such a small region of central Bohemia. At the same time there are plenty of references to bards throughout the game, a profession seen mainly in Gaelic culture. Each is as unlikely to be seen as the other, but one features and one does not.

Women are treated poorly, as they likely were back then, but the game seems to actively delight in this fact and push an obnoxious, hyper-masculine attitude down players’ throats. And while Kingdom Come sets itself up as the bastion of realism (see: no people of colour), there are no children anywhere, you drink booze to save your game and the hero’s journey ends up taking a very fairytale turn as the story progresses.

There’s a lot of sneering hypocrisy to unpick, and even more to be taken from the director and lead writer’s attitudes and viewpoints. Look up Burzum and Daniel Vávra. If you try to fob that off as an innocent mistake, more power to you. You’re able to ignore more than us. But is Kingdom Come: Deliverance a racist, hateful game? No. It’s more complex than that. Safe to say, it is very much a game coming from a specific, nationalistic/historic viewpoint – and it’s not a viewpoint many, ourselves included, will be comfortable with.