Video Game / Yes, Your Grace

From left to right: Queen Aurelea, King Eryk, Princess Cedani, Princess Asalia, and Princess Lorsulia

Yes, Your Grace is a kingdom management RPG developed by Brave At Night.

The player takes control of King Eryk of Davern as he finds out that the barbarian nation of Radovia is about to march on his small kingdom, and finds himself in need of an army much bigger than the one he currently has to repel them. In the meantime, he still needs to provide for his kingdom's people and keep his family happy on a very limited treasury and supply of extra food. There are people who are able or willing to help, but rarely entirely out of the goodness of their hearts… provided they are honest about it in the first place.

The game requires the player to find a balance between growing Eryk's army, providing for his kingdom, and preserving his family life, those imperatives sometimes finding themselves at odds with each other. Many of the player's decisions are subject to a Choice-and-Consequence System that has an impact on the options available to them in later parts of the game's plot.

In July 2023, a sequel titled Yes Your Grace: Snowfall was announced for a 2024 release.

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The game provides examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo: If the refugee peasants aren't taken in during the first week of the final siege, the enemy will later find use of their heads as catapult ammo.
• Action Prologue: The very beginning of each playthrough takes place during a version of the final siege in which the castle hasn't been upgraded with extra defenses and weapons, in which one of the decisions is whether to kill or spare a deserter. This gives the player a glimpse of the kind of decisions they will need to be able to make by the end of the game. By comparison, early game decisions (outside of those forced by the early part of the plot) are easier and matter much less to the bigger picture individually.
• All Witches Have Cats: When Ivo starts his Witch Hunt, one of his criteria to tell if someone is witch is ownership of pets, with cats among the examples.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: Victims of this include:
  • The decoration on Eryk's tunic (a very low-res sideways-facing stork).
  • Audry's shoulder pad and the stork on his clothes.
  • Cedani's hair ribbon and the slanted flounces on her dress. After her possible makeover, her skirt slit falls victim to this as well. She's particularly noticeable due to facing different ways while in line with petitioners and when found playing.
  • Maya's skirt slit, that is supposed to be on only one side according to the more detailed portrait that was made of her.
• And Your Reward Is Edible: Some peasants are grateful enough for the help provided to them that they show up a few weeks later with a food item that can be added to the castle's food supplies.
• An Economy Is You: The game swings back and forth between justified cases and aversions.
  • The justified aspect is that the merchants come to Eryk rather than the other way around, so people who don't think their wares will interest a King don't bother coming to the throne room in the first place.
  • On the aversion side, some of the merchants who have things to sell Eryk have inventories consisting of what he actually needs to buy from them and various items that can technically be purchased, but are useless in terms of gameplay. There are even a couple merchants who only sell items that are a complete waste of gold.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • For the first eight weeks, Eryk doesn't need to worry about feeding his army. Considering that it's also impossible to keep the army from being huge for a few weeks, then lose the bulk of it, having to feed it during that time would make the game unnecessarily frustrating.
  • One important questline involves buying at least two items from two different merchants who come to the throne room. If everything needed from each of them is purchased from them on their first visit, neither of them are ever seen again. If Eryk forgets to get something from them, they both visit a second time.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: The Radovian Army, which is basically a cobbled-together army of refugees using whatever scraps and weird ideas they have to gain an edge.
• Arranged Marriage: One of the ways that you can recruit allies in the game is by marrying your daughters off to foreign princes.
• Authority in Name Only:
  • Eryk skirts very close to this trope. It's shown that he has the potential to build a decently large army as seen in the final act, but for some reason, he doesn't have the authority to instill conscription in his domain. This extends to his standing army, which is only a hundred strong while neighboring kings have at least a thousand. His own domain also doesn't yield much taxes and supplies, forcing him to rely on subordinate lords and foreign allies for the entire length of the game. It's a wonder his kingdom hasn't been invaded several times over by this point.
  • Beyran outright falls into this in regards to many, as only his own followers acknowledge him as a King. It's mentioned several times that he's hoping Eryk will make good on his promise to let him marry Lorsulia precisely so his King title can become a little more legitimate.
• Ban on Magic: Ivo gets very militant about banning witchcraft later in the game. The ritual meant to ensure a male heir to Eryk going south and killing Aurelea can greatly contribute to magic getting banned in Davern, as well.
• Being Good Sucks: Taking the "good" option of some pairs of mutually exclusive objectives is not for players who have few resources:
  • Siding with the Lord who wants the sale of Oracle Dust banned means either letting him trade with the enemy or paying weekly installments to keep his business afloat. Going with the Lord trading in Oracle Dust results in an extra source of revenue and unlocks hounds to use during the battle against Radovia.
  • Fabioun's objective in Act 3, which requires helping Radovians on three occasions. One demand requires sparing a certain quantity of food per week for a group of refugees, while another requires refusing to kill Radovian combatants to the face of people whose family members were killed by Radovians, resulting in a drop in population contentment. Oh, and Via Lyt will stop her gold payments a few weeks after the refugees are helped.
• Bittersweet Ending: This occurs if Eryk fails to take any of the actions needed to save his family. He ultimately manages to save Davern, but a massive personal cost. In addition, without a male heir, Davern is plunged into a succession crisis after Eryk's death.
• Black Comedy Pet Death: Cedani's pets can keep meeting increasingly horrible fates. Some of them are potentially funny in a Black Comedy way. Some are not.
• Branch-and-Bottleneck Plot Structure: The plot includes quite a few mandatory elements, including the events closing each of the game's three acts. Certain objectives need to be met to allow them go well, but the means via which they are met are up to the player, who is given several options.
• Bulk Buy Only: Eryk only gets the opportunity to use gold to buy more food or to sell food for gold when a specific type of merchant shows up. Those merchants will either only sell a large quantity of food, or will only be willing to buy a fixed quantity of food, as a package deal. There is no option to buy or sell anything less than that.
• But Thou Must!: The game has moments of this, where blatantly bad options are the only options possible. Then it proceeds to berate player for picking them, despite there wasn't a real choice to make.
• Cavalry Refusal: Atana's army does this during the battle against Radovia by simply not showing up when called, which makes it a Cavalry Betrayal as well.
• Caught Coming Home Late: Asalia sneaks out to a wedding, and comes back from it quite late into the night. She's caught by Lorsulia, who tells Eryk.
• The Chains of Commanding: Eryk just wants his beloved and his people to be happy and live in peace. Unfortunately, politics demand that he marry one or all of his daughters away to men they have never seen before, and still might not have enough resources and money to help everyone.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Smudge the snail. He enables the entire plot of the game to happen since Eryk would have died within the first few weeks without him.
• Collateral Angst: Due to the player being encouraged to adopt Eryk's point of view, the troubles undergone by other characters often take a back seat to Eryk's feelings about them.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: King Eryk eventually realizes that if he hadn't assumed Beyran and his army were coming to invade unless Lorsulia or Asalia was married off to him, and taken the time to listen to the people involved, he could have avoided the entire conflict, alongside the death and hatred that came along with it.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Aurelea is prominently featured in the trailer for Snowfall, while both Audry and Cedani can be spotted in individual shots. Finishing the first game with those three characters alive isn't guaranteed.
• Cycle of Hurting: Making neglecting the needs to the general population too much of a long-term strategy can result in this. Fewer taxes come in if too many people are refused help, and too little tax revenue can make it impossible for Eryk to afford even the smaller demands for help and the salaries of the agents whose primary purpose is to be sent to deal with problems on location.
• Death of a Child: Up to three out of four of Eryk's children can die in some routes, and the oldest of them can't be older than fourteen when it happens. Lorsulia's death is mandatory, while Cedani can die to the hounds that get in during the first week of the siege and the baby can be stillborn.
• Deus ex Machina: When Davern's army is hopelessly outnumbered and all tricks and reserves are used up, just as they're about to be defeated, an avalanche destroys the Radovian Army. This backfires as Ivo cites this as evidence of Eryk supporting witchcraft.
• Driven to Suicide: If Eryk doesn't manage to help Pietro, he will eventually take his own life.
• Domestic Abuse: You find out that your eldest daughter's new, seemingly friendly, husband beats her on a regular basis and there is nothing you can do about it.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: In some decisions with three options, the "middle" one is the best:
  • When choosing Lorsulia's wedding dress, the cheapest option will get negative comments, while the most expensive one will get negative comments and be hated by Lorsulia herself. This makes the middleground option the best one.
  • Taking too much of a cut of the profits from the tavern will result in it going bankrupt quickly, while taking the owner's initial offer result in Eryk clearly getting ripped off.
  • The upkeep of the army will cost supplies after a certain point in game, with bigger armies costing more. Growing the army too fast will result in having to pay a very steep cost for several weeks to avoid getting deserters, while a "slow, but steady" approach will minimize the time for which the costs will be at their highest.
• Faint in Shock: King Eryk has to deal with The Chains of Commanding on a daily basis. There are a few moments in the game where he gets really bad news on top of this. Those moments consistently knock him out.
• False Confession: Audry will falsely admit to being responsible for Talys's death if Eryk refuses to pin it on one of the people who have both an obvious motive and actual evidence against them.
• Fantastic Drug: Oracle Dust has all the hallmarks of a drug: both medicinal and recreational uses, highly addictive, controversial legal status, bad withdrawals and people dying of overdose on a regular basis.
• Fantastic Racism: If Beyran is executed and Eryk chooses to exterminate the Radovians, the Radovians are forced to scatter all over the continent and live in hiding or risk being hunted down by the established kingdoms.
• Feminine Mother, Tomboyish Daughter: Aurelea adheres to traditional notions of femininity and gender roles, often expressing discomfort at her daughter's lifestyle. Asalia, conversely, enjoys sword fighting and adopts a tomboyish wardrobe and hair change later in the story. The extent to which Eryk supports his daughter's lifestyle choices is determined by the player.
• Fictional Age of Majority: Thirteen is implied to be the agreed-upon age for marriage. Lorsulia expects to be married off at any time due to having reached that age. Asalia, who's around a year younger than her, treats it as a much less immediate problem when it comes to her, but can still be married off if Eryk chooses to do so.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The three agents at Eryk's disposal by the end of the game fall into this:
  • Stan is the army's general. He's the only one of the three wearing armor and can get help from his subordinates, making him the one best suited for tasks requiring a good physical build.
  • Alena is a witch and effectively the Court Mage once she's hired, best suited for anything that requires magic.
  • Velek is a Hunter of Monsters who works alone, relying on stealth, familiarity with various creatures and mundane weapons to catch his prey. He tends to be requested for tasks suited neither for Stan nor for Alena.
• Find the Cure!: Paloma, Atana's Queen, has a mysterious illness that she seems to have had had for at least several years. Her husband and son are both desperate to find a cure.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The Radovian bandit captured early in the game claims to answer to no King. If kept in the dungeons and interrogated, he will outright mock Beyran and his followers. After getting his first letter from "Beyran, King of Radovia", Eryk comes to the conclusion that the bandit was lying about not following any King. It later turns out that Beyran's followers and the bandits are two different groups who just happen to both be from Radovia, which makes sense if the bandit wasn't lying.
  • Eryk and Aurelea figure out that Maya is from Radovia because they recognize the toy she gives Cedani from when Beyran was robbing them a long time ago. Maya turns out to be related to the other person they saw in possession of a similar item. Another hint is Asalia's claim that Maya knew some of the people who died in the battle against Radovia, which was really against Beyran's followers.
  • When the black scarf is received, it turns out to be too small for both Aurelea (adult) and Asalia (twelve years old) to wear, Cedani (implied single-digit age) being the only one it fits. A single cat's fur can't provide much material.
  • If one cares to listen to the fairy tale that has convinced Cedani that she can turn her hedgehog into a prince, the story turns out to be about a king accidentally promising his daughter to the hedgehog protagonist, who then turns out to be a transformed prince who needed to find love to change back (it's Hans the Hedgehog if it got a Disney adaptation). Eryk admits to finding the early part of the story familiar due to his promise to marry Lorsulia to Beyran. If Fabioun's deal is taken in Act 3, the story can actually end in a way similar to the fairy tale, the commonality being that Beyran, initially an undesired suitor for Lorsulia, becomes a precious political ally. Getting that ending requires showing compassion towards people who initially don't seem to deserve it.
• For Want Of A Nail: Cedani upends the palace kitchen while attempting to find her pet snail, Smudge. This results in a pair of wine glasses being switched, poisoning and killing King Talys instead of King Eryk, the intended target. This serves as the impetus of the plot for the rest of the game. Upon discovering what happened during the ending, Eryk even remarks that his survival was down to pure chance.
• Frame-Up: King Talys is poisoned and killed by his son, Ivo. Various pieces of evidence found around the castle seemingly indicate that either Lord Noaksey, Lord Etton, or Lady Lena are the guilty party. All three of them are innocent.
• Furniture Blockade: Near the end of the final siege, all surviving members of the Royal family are shown cooped up in the Royal Chambers with a chest drawers against the only door, which the enemy soldiers are clearly trying to force open. It gets a little odd if Aurelea is dead and Eryk chooses to stay to fight with his men, since the room's entire human population is some combination of Cedani and the baby, who are both too small to have been able to move the chest.
• Giant Poofy Sleeves: The most expensive wedding dress option for Lorsulia has big puffy sleeves around the shouders. They contribute to the excessive garnish the dress is considered to have by other characters.
• Golden Ending: This occurs if Eryk is able to keep his entire family with the exception of Lorsulia alive. This means allowing Asalia to run away with Maya, allowing Cedani to keep Wojtek as a pet, successfully completing Aurelea's ritual to ensure a male heir, saving Audry, sparing Beyran, and executing Ivo. This allows Davern to enter a new golden age with Eryk's dynasty secured, and with violence from Atana minimized for the foreseeable future.
• Guide Dang It!: There are a few things that require paying attention during one's first playthrough or having watched a Let's Play beforehand to figure out:
  • While the number of men promised by the Lords is a one-time thing, the gold and supplies they promise are actually weekly payments. This, among other things, means that those providing supplies are basically paying for their own men's weekly upkeep. In addition, with the exception of Lena and Via Lyt's, those payments are guaranteed to continue in Act 3, provided the alliance was forged before the end of Act 2.
  • The gift Eryk makes for Aurelea is the one and only task that requires combining inventory items with each other. The necessary items are also all easy to miss, and, if noticed, can't be grabbed before they are needed.
  • Petitioners can be called out of order, but the game doesn't tell the player that.
  • Eryk can avoid losing men to low morale between the second and third week of the final siege by talking to the soldiers sitting around the fire a second time after giving them supplies and accepting to have a drink with them. Most players will talk to the soldiers just once to give them supplies, dole out supplies to the royal family and peasants, then call it a day. And since talking to anyone a second time during the first week's campfire doesn't yield anything new, players are unlikely to try it during the second week's campfire.
• Hates Being Nicknamed: Cedani can be given nicknames like "potato-head" or "silly pickle" by Eryk. She will express dissatisfaction at these nicknames, though she ultimately puts up with them for the rest of the story.
• Hates Their Parent: This can be invoked with Asalia, depending on the choices you make with her. The most influential of these choices is whether or not you allow her to run away with Maya. If you prohibit her from doing so, she absconds anyway and never speaks to her parents again.
• The Hecate Sisters: The rodzanice spirits that can be summoned to ensure that Eryk's youngest child is male consist of a little girl, a young woman and an old woman.
• Heir Club for Men: This puts additional pressure on Eryk, as his age is already catching up to him and he has only daughters, which means that no heir to the throne exists and that he and his wife need to keep trying for a fourth child in the hopes that they will finally have a son.
• Hereditary Wedding Dress: Deconstructed. The cheapest option for Lorsulia's wedding dress is to get her mother Aurelea's wedding dress out of storage. Since the storage conditions weren't exactly optimal, the dress is no longer white and smells.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • If you choose no scapegoat for the Royal Trial, Audry the advisor will make a scapegoat out of himself to save your life.
  • Alena the Court Witch can sacrifice herself to lift the fog during the final siege. Velek the Court Hunter can also be lost to a move to counter the enemy's mining efforts or in an attempt to stop the hounds that get into the castle.
• Impoverished Patrician: Downplayed, but still clearly present. Despite being the king of a kingdom, Eryk doesn't have much in way of a fortune. In fact, lower-ranked nobles are consistently depicted as being in much better shape than him. It gets to the point where even a knight has more men than he does.
• I Miss Mom: It's entirely possible to end the game with Aurelea dead but Cedani still alive. In such routes, the final scene that is supposed to involve Eryk, Aurelea, Cedani and the baby if all four are alive will include Cedani saying she wishes Aurelea was present.
• Imperfect Ritual: This can happen during the ritual near the end of the game, due to anything from missing ingredients to incorrectly repeated chants. It results in two desired outcomes of the properly performed ritual becoming mutually exclusive, forcing Eryk to choose between having a heir and having his wife live.
• In-Game Banking Services: The Bank of Florentini provides loans of both gold and food supplies that need to be reimbursed in fixed installments over the following weeks. Barring the very first loan taken, the interest takes the form of an extra installment after the money has been paid back.
• Interrupted Intimacy: At some point, Eryk and Aurelea are very obviously trying to produce a male heir behind the closed curtains of their canopy bed. Cedani then barges in, complaining about a prank Asalia pulled on her. Asalia then shows up as well, trying to claim the prank isn't as bad as Cedani is making it sound. The bump behind the curtain splits into two distinct figures, a little parenting happens and the girls are shooed out of the room. Eryk quips that this is the reason he doesn't have a heir yet.
• Invading Refugees: In the game's third act, it's revealed that the Radovian army is just a large band of refugees fleeing the civil war in their barren homeland, and that all they wanted was to carve out a new home.
• It's Always Spring: There are a few verbal hints of the passage of seasons, including Eryk judging a contest celebrating the arrival of spring very late in the game. However, the castle's vegetation never changes and rainy days tend to happen off-screen to create some of each week's petitioner demands. It also never gets too hot or too cold for anyone's usual outfit.
• Jackass Genie: If no gifts are provided to them, the rodzanice spirits can become this and give Eryk what he wants of them in the most cruel way possible: the baby is made into a boy, but stillborn and Aurelea dies.
• Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life: Ending the game with one of the resources technically in the negative will result in a bad ending associated with the resource being greatly mismanaged. This means it's possible, for example, to get the ending in which the Bank of Florentini takes over Davern because of debt so low the money could have easily been made back within a week of normal gameplay.
• Judgment of Solomon: A pair of female petitioners show up fighting over a baby, and one of the dialogue options lets Eryk solve the conflict exactly the same way Solomon did. Another lets neither woman have the baby, and has it given to castle servants to raise instead.
• Justified Tutorial: The Action Prologue and the first eight weeks of the game are used to teach or remind the player of the game's basic ropes. While the Action Prologue takes care of "which button does what" level things, events occurring during the first eight weeks will teach the player how to invite allies and send agents to locations where they weren't specifically requested. The relative number of decisions with tangible short-term consequences is also high compared to the rest of the game.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: King Ivo's fate is the last decision made by the player. As the character's survival is essential to the Golden Ending, making the choice that results in their death can change the general ending obtained if the player otherwise made the choices required to get all the other good endings from the Modular Epilogue.
• Let's Have Another Baby: Justified for Eryk and Aurelea, since Eryk wouldn't mind having an heir and their existing children are all girls.
• Lies to Children: There is a young child in the game, and the player is controlling her father. The option to sugar-coat things for her shows up several times, and is sometimes the only way the player will be allowed to approach certain subjects.
• Limited Wardrobe: The entire cast wears the same outfit throughout the year during which the game takes place.
  • The only characters with a second outfit are Lorsulia when she gets married, Asalia after her makeover, and Cedani after her own makeover. While Asalia retailors her usual dress, Cedani has the presence of mind to retailor her other dress, which gives every indication of having originally been a Palette Swap of her usual one.
  • There are a couple thieves who are identified by their clothing because the graphics are way too pixelated for anyone to have a distinct face, and even hair is tricky for anyone with a hat. Eryk catching them relies entirely on them not changing clothes after scamming the people who warned Eryk about them.
• Living Lie Detector: A rooster that crows when someone tells a lie around it can be purchased at some point in the game.
• Medieval Universal Literacy: Averted. In the two first acts, the Lords whose standing army Eryk is borrowing can be summoned by messenger pigeon. In the third act, in which the army is made of peasants, representatives of villages need to be contacted in person by Eryk's agents because they can't read.
• Modular Epilogue: Each character whose survival is essential to getting the Golden Ending has at least two individual endings, including the one the player should ideally avoid. Aside from a scenario involving Aurelea and the baby, the fates of those characters are independent from each other, resulting in a mix an match in who gets good or bad endings.
• Multiple Endings: While there are numerous outcomes for various characters, there are two major endings for the overall plot.
• Mundane Fantastic: The pests peasants complain about are frequently smaller magical creatures. When refusing to help with them, Eryk will frequently treat them as run-of-the-mill hazards people should be able to deal with themselves.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: This happens with some pairs of allies:
  • Etton and Lurs, as the former trades in Oracle Dust and the latter is effectively on a crusade against it.
  • Sir Friderick and Noaksey, a famous knight and a Hunter of Monsters respectively, who consider each other to be frauds. If Eryk takes one of them on as an ally, the other will refuse to help him.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: The cutscenes, especially the many from the game's last hour or so, can be quite inconsistent about the paintings remaining in the Royal chambers, Cedani's outfit and Asalia's look. The state of the former two depends on player decisions, meaning that the cutscene depiction will sometimes be correct. The change in the latter is a mandatory element of the plot and involves a major haircut and dress retailoring.
• Not in Front of the Kid: If the Royal Trial is resolved via the False Confession from Audry, Asalia and Cedani are asked to leave the room.
• Not Listening to Me, Are You?: When told that Lorsulia is going to marry Ivo, it takes Aurelea a few moments to compute that she's being told that Lorsulia is not going to marry Beyran.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: A frequent twist to seemingly benevolent choices:
  • The classic case is Eryk turning out to have "helped" a very convincing conman, sometimes at the price of helping someone who really needed the money or supplies.
  • The alliance with Atana ends up effectively consisting of Eryk marrying his daughter off to an abusive jerk who, regardless of the route taken, eventually kills her and withdraws the help the marriage was "paying" for the first chance he gets.
  • The Etton vs Lurs choice first seems like a "Would you rather have Oracle Dust money or a clear conscience?" choice. Siding with Lurs and jailing the Oracle Dust seller results in not only Etton, but many of his friends boycotting Lurs' spice business. The boycotting results in Lurs resorting to trade with Radovians to stay afloat. The only alternative is for Eryk to buy Lurs' spices himself, and he may not be able to afford it. And if Eryk can neither afford to support Lurs' business nor stand having an ally who's trading with Radovians, he can say bye-bye to Lurs' soldiers before he can even get them.
  • The choice between letting Asalia run away with Maya and grounding her until she gets over her seems like a no-brainer: Asalia and Maya are both children, after all, and there’s good reason to believe the two of them wouldn't survive very long outside the castle. However, if Asalia's request is refused, she escapes and runs away anyway, and is so jaded that she never bothers to send letters afterwards.
• Not That Kind of Mage: Eryk can invoke this. Alena the Court Witch seems to have quite versatile abilities. If she isn't available when a petitioner seeks her for Weather Manipulation, Eryk can claim that she's more of a healer.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. People are really into naming their daughters after Lorsulia. Because of this, Eryk will meet a little girl named "Lulie" (Lorsulia's In-Series Nickname) and one possible story branch results in the birth of a baby girl that gets named Lorsulia.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: The spellbook for a certain ritual has the following disclaimer:
  The author and publishing company of "Performance of Rituals: Curses and Healing" are not responsible for any side effects nor for damages caused for incorrect performance of the rituals.
• Point of No Return: If Eryk enters his bedroom after being informed Aurelea wants to talk to him on the last week before the wedding, he's not allowed to leave until he has chosen a wedding dress. All other mandatory family conversations allow Eryk to leave the room as long as they are taken care of before the end of the turn.
• Press Start to Game Over: Within a minute of starting the Action Prologue, you have the option to raise a white flag in surrender, resulting in the entire castle being massacred. The game then advises you to never give up, and kicks you back to the main menu.
• Promptless Branching Point: The treasury and number of agents is limited enough that they effectively work as this. Most of the time, the collective demands of a given week's petitioners outstrip the resources at the player's disposal, and financial choices made a few turns earlier can result in the player having more or fewer resources at their disposal than what they are expected during the current turn.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • The battle against the Radovians ends in Davern's victory, but at a high cost. While the Radovian army is shattered, Davern's forces suffer massive casualties, and all of the allied Lords will pull their support, leaving Davern dangerously vulnerable to an attack by Atana.
  • In the game's bad ending, Eryk can repel Ivo's invasion, but poor choices and poor management can cause the death of most of Eryk's family as well as the kingdom itself falling into decline and collapsing.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: An invading army in a fantasy game? What colors could they be wearing besides red and black? In the present case, the moral implications are subverted with Beyran, his followers and Maya.
• Retraux: The game is mostly in a pseudo-Side View with 8-bit graphics. The fluidity of the animation, the range of color and the Modular Epilogue betray the fact it's actually a newer game.
• Revenge by Proxy: This is a factor in Lorsulia and Dusty's deaths, as their killer holds someone who cares about them as responsible for the murder at the end of the first act.
• Sadistic Choice: The game's opening itself tells the player the game is one of tough choices:
  • The basic mechanics of the petitioner help system involves choosing who gets help, and sometimes what help they get.
  • Any money spent on upgrades ranging from giving Lorsulia a better wedding to giving the castle a chance during a coming siege is money that can't be used to help petitioners.
  • Grego, one of the potential allies, will require one of the castle's painting to give Eryk his men and will offer good money for three others after that. A good way to get a little extra cash, except that he's acquiring them to burn them. And one of the things that can be sold to him is a tapestry made by Aurelea.
  • The sets of Mutually Exclusive Party Members. Support the Fantastic Drug trade for extra cash or help ban it and choose between letting your new ally trade with the enemy or financially supporting him? Ally with a phony hero who's otherwise a decent person or a real veteran who is a Domestic Abuser?
  • If a ritual near the end of the game is botched, Eryk has to choose between having a heir and having his wife live past the ritual.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Radovians attempting to invade Davern are actually refugees fleeing from a bitter civil war in their homeland. In addition, after the first battle with the Radovians, all of Eryk's allied Lords with withdraw their support due to the heavy casualties suffered.
• Schrödinger's Question: The fact that the toy Maya gives Cedani is typical of Radovia is more relevant to the plot than what it looks like, so the player is given three small animals that the toy can be in the shape of; the only difference between the three is Cedani's comment on how well a real, live, member of the species would have worked as an agent.
• Single Sex Offspring: Eryk's children are all female, apparently as the result of the curse. If he doesn't complete the magical ritual his fourth child is also female.
• Splash of Color: When Eryk remembers two moments that explain the plot's last mystery, the entire scene is in monochrome, while the person whose actions are relevant and their immediate surroundings are in the game's usual colors.
• A Taste of Power: The very first deal Eryk gets in the game will grant him up to 6000 men. That's 6 times the minimum required to win the battle. Too bad the entire game up to that point is just a tutorial and his giant army will be taken away from him.
• That Came Out Wrong: A petitioner shows up with some strange disease that makes his skin itch all over. The guy happens to believe being touched by a king cures diseases, so accepting to touch his face is the cheapest way to help him. If that option is chosen, he'll show up later to thank Eryk, feeling much better. Right after he leaves, Eryk realizes that his own skin is starting to itch. After spelling out that the diseases looks like something that goes away on its own after a while, Audry suggests that Eryk could make his recovery faster by touching himself.
• Tragically Misguided Favor: One petitioner's problem is that he sold his barn to buy his overworked wife a servant to help her around the house. The barn was the family's main source of revenue. The wife wasn't happy about it, and stayed angry when he started working in a potato farm to make up for it. The options to help the guy, if at all, are to give him the money to buy the barn back or having the Court Witch cast a little "falling back in love" magic.
• Tragic Stillbirth: A possible outcome of Eryk's attempt at producing an heir.
• Tomboy Princess: Eryk's middle daughter falls under this category, as she loves swordplay and disdains traditional princess activities.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • Aside from the ritual materials, none of the items that can be purchased for members of the royal family are essential to getting the Golden Ending and the effects of getting them can end as soon as the same turn. On the other hand, if the player has spare gold on hand, they can just buy the present for the sake of it.
  • The level of population contentment at which tax revenue maxes out is way lower than the maximal contentment value. The player can very well have Eryk continue helping as many people as possible despite it no longer resulting in more tax revenue.
  • Alena and Velek can be sacrificed to fix problems during the siege and whether they are kept alive or not doesn't matter to the game's ending. They can be saved by one of the rewards for meeting Fabioun's objectives or waiting the problem out at the price of soldier lives for one, having mining equipment and letting Cedani keep Wojtek for the other. Almost all of those require the player to plan in advance.
  • When needing to decide whether to execute the deserter during the actual final siege or not, the player may choose to consider that killing the man would make a little girl an orphan rather than their opinion about deserters.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • At the beginning of the game, there is man who is already in the Dungeons essentially for attempting to drink and dash. When he gets out is entirely up to the player, and it's technically possible to keep him there for the entire playthrough, by which point a year will have passed.
  • Deliberately getting the bad endings entails, among other things, knowingly sending Eryk's middle daughter into an awful marriage, deliberately botching a complex ritual so his wife dies, possibly alongside his unborn child, and making sure there is nothing to stand between his youngest daughter and the hounds who find their way into the castle during the siege, which includes sending his Court Hunter on a suicide mission during the first week.
  • Not giving food to the Royal family during the siege will make everyone sick and keep Aurelea and Cedani from showing up at the third campfire, but it won't kill them. But that also means that they are going through those cutscenes while starving.
• Voice Grunting: Characters utter various sounds while speaking, usually one each time their dialog is scrolled through.
• You All Look Familiar:
  • There are many petitioners, and only so many models for them. Some recurring petitioners have unique models to let the player know it's the same person, but there is enough overall reuse of models that it can take the first playthrough to figure out which models are the unique ones.
  • Lampshaded the first time Eryk speaks with Sobik, the soldier from the Action Prologue, during the game proper. Sobik turns out to have been the generic castle guard bringing news once in a while, but admits all guards look identical with their helmets on. Because of the quality of the game's graphics, the player has to base themself on build, clothing and hair to tell characters apart. Sobik becomes distinguishable from other soldiers during the final siege due to losing his helmet right before it starts.
• You Are Grounded!: Asalia will sneak out to go to a wedding early in the game, and Eryk will prevent her from leaving the castle for a while after that as punishment. The end of the grounding period isn't explicitly stated, but it seems to be done by the time Maya is forbidden to enter the castle, as Asalia is still regularly seeing her after this and has to leave the castle to do so.
• You Lose at Zero Trust: If the people's general contentment^note something the player will want to keep at a decent level to get high taxes dips into the negative, a Torches and Pitchforks crowd will show up demanding a quantity of gold and supplies that Eryk is unlikely to have at hand if things ended up getting that bad in the first place. If the peasants don't get what they want, the last thing the player will see is the crowd coverging towards the throne, and a black-and-white version of a screen usually only seen at the end of the game, bemoaning the fact Eryk wasn't able to keep his people happy.

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