Verdict: ★★★✩✩ (6.5/10)

Passpartout 2: The Lost Artist is the long-awaited sequel to 2017's indie artist sim Passpartout: The Starving Artist, capturing the essence of the original game while expanding upon its mechanics to develop a unique gameplay experience. Expanding upon the first game’s “living puppet theater” aesthetic, Passpartout 2 features an actual traversable isometric map designed like a diorama for the player to explore. The game follows the journey of eponymous French artist Passpartout as they rebuild their reputation as an artist in the fictional town of Phénix following their disappearance from the public eye after the events of the first game (where Passpartout's initial rise to fame was depicted).

Passpartout 2 boasts a heavily improved gameplay experience. While its predecessor confined the player's artistry to fixed locations, such as at Passpartout's garage at the beginning of the game to Passpartout's new office by its end, the sequel allows the player to make and sell art all throughout the town or in their own studio (after earning enough money to buy it, of course). Commissions from NPCs are now available, as Passpartout is tasked to help out with developing art for the various denizens of Phénix and revive the art scene in an art-starved town.

The core of gameplay consists of the player using the basic brush and color palette at their disposal to paint on a canvas and selling it to the highest bidder, and repeat. Along the way, the player will earn enough money to buy new and better supplies. An expanded set of tools and brushes, color palettes, and canvases to choose from makes Passpartout 2 feel much more substantial than its predecessor, allowing the player to develop art with more depth and variety. The critiquing system is also more developed in the sequel, as distinct people will appreciate different kinds of art and would award more or less money for them depending on their tastes. It feels more like there’s a veritable one-to-one relationship between the effort spent on a work and the money the player makes from it than in Passpartout 2’s antecedent. (For example, property manager George is oriented towards more abstract art, teenage punk Cynth savors a level of anarchy in her work, and art mogul Adrienne appreciates art imitating famous Renaissance-era styles.) Some commissions even allow the player to try their hand at art for non-canvas products like hats, violins, cars, and swords.

The cozy European beachfront town setting and its over two dozen townsfolk has a surprising amount of depth. As the player completes more quests for the NPCs and progresses the game, Passpartout unlocks more areas to explore. Phénix has a quaint riverfront, a bustling urban street, a few mansions and estates, and a semi-shuttered museum that contains the story's end. The player can make a lasting impact on the town through the various commissions Passpartout can complete throughout the game such as designing the town's flag, marketing billboards, and a line of cars.

Despite its packed town and character relationships, a sorely missed opportunity for Passpartout 2 is in its storytelling. The game never really delves further into the story behind Passpartout and the events that passed between their rise to fame in the first game and their fresh start in the second past off-hand mentions and some newspaper clippings at the start of the sequel quickly thrown in the fire. Additionally, the game’s too-few quests are spread too thin across its various NPCs, and it becomes hard for the player to meaningfully form attachments to anyone.

Technically, Passpartout 2 is very middling. Load times feel unbearably slow for such a small game, and there are minor but ever-present technical issues such as accidentally softlocking oneself into a conversation with an NPC. While I do love the game’s pop-up art style aesthetic — pigeons are 3D wood models, chimneys are soda can tops, building walls are corrugated cardboard sheets, and wood pallets are popsicle sticks — the low-poly graphics and skin-wrapped textures make it feel more like a mobile game ported to PC than a bona fide PC game. (But despite its lackluster graphical quality for a game released in 2023, it is — when revisiting Passpartout: The Starving Artist — somehow an honest improvement.) There is no UI to track quests, haggling for higher prices is no longer a feature, and the ambient occlusion isn’t enough to compensate for the map’s awkward shadowing.

Passpartout 2 is an undoubtedly different and heavily expanded-upon game from its predecessor — with several fun moments that allow for a chuckle or two — but ultimately drags on for too long with an inadequate narrative and a painful amount of filler quests. It’s a fun game and a passable medium to try one’s hand in some mindless art, but the near-dozen hours one can spend on it aren’t nearly as engaging as would be desired.

Verdict: ★★★★★ (10/10)

King of the Castle is a player-led medieval fantasy narrative masquerading as a political party game with its host-and-audience interaction scheme, easy-to-use interface and design, and high level of player autonomy. The story of each game follows the political machinations of a newly-crowned monarch and their political advisors — composed of chiefs and nobles from the various territories under the crown’s rule — as they scheme against one another to gain ultimate control of the kingdom.

Gameplay is split between the monarch (the host) and the nobles (the audience), all of whom serve collectively as counsel to the monarch and effectively puppet their every decision. Each session pulls three nobles from a set of five: the Barons of the March, the Chiefs of the North, the Counts of the East, the Grandees of the South, and the Patricians of the Coast. The audience is then split into these three factions. From this comes the two-tier voting system that is central to the game’s mechanics: each “noble” (audience member) from a given domain would vote from a set of choices that respond to some given event, and the majority response would become that territory’s vote on the council. The decisions of the crown as such rest on the overall majority vote, influenced by the laws that the monarch would set for that particular voting session. King of the Castle has mechanical parallels to 2016 strategy game Reigns as different elements of the kingdom such as its treasury, stability, military, faith, etc. must be kept in balance to ensure the dynasty’s survival.

The monarch’s aim is to acquire an heir and fulfill their chosen ambition such as global domination and dictatorial rule or economic prosperity and kingdom-wide peace. The various factions, meanwhile, each attempt to disrupt the monarch’s ambitions and advance their own.

My session of King of the Castle was composed of myself as the host and Queen with three friends as the Chief of the North, Count of the East, and Patrician of the Coast. Each friend roleplayed as the noble of their respective dominion and chose one of three schemes that their faction would attempt to fulfill in their ploy to replace the Queen. The North chose to incite Ragnarok to overthrow the crown by force, the East chose to offer the Queen immortality — as the Counts just had to be literal vampires — in exchange for the crown, and the Coast chose to lead a conspiracy to deplete the crown’s treasury.

As the in-game years progressed, the Queen and her council were involved in various events that affected each dominion (such as famine in the North, religious crusades in the East, and “werebeast” raids in the Coast) as well as events that affected multiple dominions (i.e. border disputes between the North and the East). The various events affected the delicate balance of the kingdom in different ways, such as decimating the Coast’s farming due to the werebeast raids or skyrocketing the East’s trade with the anachronistic invention of the photograph.

Towards the game’s end, defiance in the various dominions had risen so much that the North and the Coast decided to rebel against the crown, triggering a civil war event against the Queen and the East. Because of the preceding incidents in years past, the East with its weak military and struggling economy was put in a very unfortunate position of having to join forces with the Queen against the rebelling nobles or risk annihilation. After a year of war and months under siege, the rebels inevitably won due to the East’s defection, an uncontrollable pox outbreak, and deliberate river contamination that forced a revolt of the city. The Queen was beheaded, her treacherous half-sister from the Coast was placed as the new puppet monarch, and the Patricians of the Coast emerged victorious as the leaders of a ravaged kingdom.

Our session of King of the Castle was brutal, a three-hour-long session that had me engaged the entire time. Constant backstabbing marked each passing in-game season. The North was selected as the Queen’s honor guard and became tied to the Queen by marriage but stagnated politically due to crown-influenced voting sessions that always ended poorly for them, the East practically doomed the crown by defecting to the rebels, and the North was given full control of disputed silver mines by the crown only for its ownership to be snatched up by the East and later exploited by the Coast with the Queen’s support.

King of the Castle is not a party game, as shown by the amount of narrative depth and gameplay potential it has hidden in its simple voting-based mechanics. The game’s design makes it more of an immersive roleplaying experience than a proper party game, and that’s where the crux of the game’s most significant elements lies. The interweaving of party-based gameplay and complex storytelling makes the game act more like Dungeons & Dragons than The Jackbox Party Pack, and I find that alignment quite welcome.

Each of the dominion’s potential storylines, the randomly triggered events, and the level of long-term effects is great enough that emergent gameplay is pretty much a guarantee. Alongside bug fixes and content updates, a focus on adding considerable amounts of narrative depth and nonlinearity is a must to make King of the Castle a truly great roleplaying experience.

Events at the beginning of the game had reverberating effects at the end which, while a simple and seemingly trivial finer point for an already-engaging game, makes the experience that much more immersive. One notable example during my session: the Queen chose the North as her honor guard at the start of her reign, significantly boosting its military and allowing for its unimpeded call to rebellion and siege of the castle at the end of the game. When the rebelling Coast hired an assassin to eliminate the Queen, she called for her Northern guard to rush to her aid during the attempt on her life — only to remain alone with her would-be killer in her bedchamber as the honor guard’s true allegiances were made known. (Luckily, she survived to see her own execution later on in the war, but the near-successful attempt on her life shook the castle’s political stability enough to let it fall to the rebellion’s siege.)

The voting system feels both well designed in some regards and poorly balanced in others. The system is best designed for multiples of three nobles, as having more or fewer nobles in one dominion than others imbalances voting sessions. And, the Queen herself is overall not that useful during small-party voting sessions, with only a limited set of policies that she can enact to influence each session. When two of the three dominions rebel, the sole “loyalist” dominion has full control of the council’s votes and thus the Queen’s decisions, making the Queen’s influences near-useless in these moments.

There is so much more that can’t be covered in just 1500 words, such as the potential to war against other countries and the nigh-infinite possible storylines the players together can create in each three-to-five hour long session. (A very interesting mechanic is the ability to continue the same storyline with the new — or the same, depending on the outcome of the session — monarch, adding an extra Reigns-like flavor to the mix.)

In all regards, King of the Castle is a near-perfect game. A specific blend of Reigns and Dungeons & Dragons that works surprisingly well and makes for a really immersive roleplaying experience, I struggle to give it anything other than a perfect rating.