If Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is gonna do one thing, it’s gonna make you think long and hard about everything that thing will involve. It’s the core appeal. This isn’t the kind of game where you can find a bandit camp, run in without thinking, and expect to make it out alive. No, you prepare, then prepare again.
You sharpen your sword. You buy arrows. You equip the best armor or, if you’re going for a stealthy approach, the darkest and quietest clothes money can buy. You park your horse in the best position for a speedy getaway. You make sure you’re well rested and well fed so you don’t start closing your eyes with fatigue in the middle of a fight. I’m 30 hours into the game, and I still avoid combat at all costs, grab free food whenever I can, and stop to pick a dozen of any herb I might eventually need. This is a game that trains you to think like you’re living below the poverty line, saving for a rainy day, because in Warhorse’s Bohemia, when it rains, it pours.
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Unlimited Rocks In A Limited World
Which is why it’s so interesting that the game gives you an unlimited amount of rocks. That might sound small, and it is. In fact, I’d completely forgotten about this mechanic until a recent session where I needed to distract a guard. Like I said, I avoid fighting whenever I can — even the stealthy variety. My Henry’s speech stat is high, and getting higher because I’m always talking so much. So I was surprised to be reminded that, when you do need to sneak around, you have an infinite supply of stones you can use to throw as distractions.
Unlimited throwbable stones have become increasingly common in recent open-world stealth games, but that choice feels out of place in KCD2.
This is not how this game handles anything else. If you want to brew the potion you need to save your progress, you better find and pick one nettle and two belladonna. You can’t just rummage in a sack of endless herbs. If you want to shoot your bow, you better have the arrows.
You don’t have a bottomless quiver. This game was made with great attention to detail, and rewards a similar fastidiousness in its players. You can get arrested for sleeping in the wrong bed, for walking around at night without a torch, for eating stew from the wrong pot. You count the cost before you make the journey.
And yet, if you find yourself sneaking around a fortress and need to draw a guard’s attention so you can slip past, feel free to try as many times as you want. You’ll never run out of stones to throw. It doesn’t matter that you’re in a furnished room with hardwood floors, there are — somehow — endless pebbles to pick up.
Suspending Disbelief
This would not strike me as silly in any other game. I’m extremely willing to suspend my disbelief. But Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has taught me, then reinforced at every turn, that resources are scarce and that if I want to accomplish something, I had better prepare.. So when this historically accurate RPG takes a more lenient stance to throwables than a mainstream game like The Last of Us, I notice.
Does it matter? Not really. Maybe Warhorse does this because, in order for stealth to be viable, you need a steady supply of rocks, and adding rocks to every room would strain believability further. That’s just a guess. But when a game (or any work of art) has a philosophy as clear as KCD2’s, it’s interesting to see which moments it chooses to say, “To hell with our philosophy.”
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Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 requires your full attention, and I’m ready for something a little less intense.