The King is Watching (PS5) Review – Royal Strategy, Awkward Controls

The King is Watching on PS5 Pro

Last year, The King is Wattinching left us with a kingdom worth admiring and a ruler occasionally ready to tear their crown off in frustration. Hypnohead and tinyBuild‘s clever mixture of kingdom-building, tower defence, and roguelite progression was built around a fantastic central idea: your subjects only work when the king is actually watching them.

Yet beneath that ingenuity were some familiar roguelite problems. Randomness could dismantle carefully considered strategies, while repeated runs gradually exposed the limits of its maps, events and encounters. Almost a year later, The King is Watching has finally crossed the drawbridge onto PS5. This is no dramatic reinvention of what came before, but the additional content and refinement since its original PC launch give us good reason to return to the throne.

More importantly, there is now a different question to answer. For a game where shifting your attention quickly is everything, how well does ruling with a DualSense actually work? The answer is well enough, although never quite effortlessly.

All Eyes on the Kingdom

The brilliance of The King is Watching remains remarkably simple to explain. Your kingdom consists of a grid filled with farms, mines, military buildings and other facilities, but only those underneath your limited royal gaze can operate.

Want wheat? Watch the farm. Need soldiers? Move your attention towards the barracks. Suddenly running low on another resource while an enemy army closes in? Something else will inevitably have to stop working. That restriction turns what could have been another passive resource-management game into an increasingly frantic exercise in prioritisation.

Every tile matters because its position determines how efficiently several buildings can fall underneath the same gaze. Every resource matters because investing heavily in your economy means potentially neglecting your military. Even success becomes dangerous when the game asks how much stronger you are willing to make the next enemy wave in exchange for better rewards.

There is a satisfying rhythm to getting all of those moving parts working together in The King is Watching. An efficient kingdom begins to feel like a machine you have personally engineered, switching attention between different production chains just before each becomes necessary.

Then something goes wrong, and suddenly you are staring at an approaching army while desperately wondering why you spent so much time producing lumber. That tension was the game’s greatest strength on PC, and nothing about the move to PS5 diminishes the underlying design.

A Kingdom Fighting the Controller

What does change is how easily you can interact with everything on the console version of The King is Watching. There is a considerable amount happening on-screen once a run develops. You are moving your gaze, selecting buildings, monitoring resources, checking upcoming enemies, considering upgrades, deploying abilities and navigating spells. A mouse naturally lends itself to jumping rapidly between those elements.

A controller needs considerably more organisation. The console interface therefore relies heavily on cycling between different areas and functions through tabs and shoulder-button navigation. It works, and familiarity eventually makes the sequence of inputs more instinctive, but it rarely disappears beneath your fingers the way the best console strategy adaptations do.

The issue becomes particularly noticeable once the pressure rises. The King is Watching deliberately wants to divide your attention. Its interface instead asks you to concentrate on navigating towards the thing you want before you can actually deal with it. The result is additional cognitive friction layered on top of a game that already thrives on overwhelming you.

Tooltips can also consume a sizeable portion of the screen while you are trying to read the wider state of your kingdom. Information is essential in a strategy game like this, but displaying more of it does not always make that information easier to process. None of this makes The King is Watching unpleasant to play on PS5. It simply means the controller occasionally feels like another system you are managing.

More Reasons to Keep Watching

Fortunately, this is also a healthier kingdom than the one we originally ruled. The PS5 release of The King is Watching includes the Volcano Update, which introduces another biome alongside additional enemies, bosses, and strategic possibilities. That extra environment matters because variety was one of the areas where the original game eventually began to buckle under repeated runs.

There are simply more variables now capable of disrupting the comfortable patterns that had previously emerged. New challenges force another round of experimentation, while the wider pool of possibilities gives the progression loop more room before repetition begins setting in.

The familiar weaknesses have not vanished. Random rewards can still leave a promising strategy without the building or resource combination needed to realise it. Runs can still collapse because opportunity and preparation failed to meet at the right moment. That uncertainty is part of the roguelite equation, but The King is Watching occasionally allows randomness to feel more decisive than your actual rulership.

It nevertheless remains exceptionally good at turning failure into motivation. Permanent progression, additional rulers, advisors and upgrades continually leave something dangling just beyond reach. A failed kingdom rarely feels like wasted time when the next attempt arrives with another possibility to investigate.

The Crown Still Fits

Returning to The King is Watching reinforces just how smart its central idea is. The royal gaze is more than a gimmick as it influences city planning, production, military preparation and ultimately the entire rhythm of every run. Few strategy games make the simple act of paying attention feel quite so mechanically important.

There is more surrounding that idea on console than when we first reviewed the game, and the additional variety goes some way towards addressing the repetition that previously held it back. What prevents the console version from becoming an easy replacement for PC is fittingly another matter of attention. There is already enough to think about without having to fight through interface layers to make the decision you have already made.

Learn its controller language and The King is Watching remains an absorbing, demanding little strategy game capable of consuming far more evenings than its modest presentation suggests. The crown has grown heavier since we last wore it, but thankfully, there are now more reasons to keep it on.

The King is Watching is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.