King's Field-style dungeon crawler Queen's Domain hits consoles and PC on October 30

Queen's Domain has a date. Freshly Baked Games' first-person action RPG, which wears its King's Field influence openly, launches on October 30 for PS5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC via Steam. Future Friends Games publishes.

What you're getting into

You are on the Isle of Neasied looking for your father, and the island is not pleased about it. The Steam listing describes a retro-fantasy action RPG with brutal combat and traversal-focused exploration across an interconnected world - the sort of structure that folds back on itself with shortcuts rather than handing you a map marker.

Combat runs on a stamina meter, with charge attacks, weapon-specific special moves and more than 20 kinds of throwing weapon. The headline number is over 50 melee weapons to find, equip and upgrade, set against more than 100 enemies and bosses.

The most un-King's-Field thing about it is the Holy Sword Endu, which enables flight and turns traversal into a platforming problem rather than a walking one. The developer promises dozens of hours of it.

A crowded lane

Slow, first-person, deliberately stiff dungeon crawlers in the FromSoftware mould have quietly become a genre of their own on Steam, and Queen's Domain is one of the more visible ones - it has a demo up, and PC Gamer has already flagged it as aimed squarely at people who miss classic FromSoftware. The October 30 date puts it a day before Halloween and into a busy autumn.