For almost a month, I have been mildly obsessed with “The Elder Scrolls: Castles,” a new mobile game about running a medieval fantasy kingdom, where a day playing in real life is a year of court intrigue. Wrestling plagues, curses, diabolical wizards, tension between fantasy races and regional politics, “Castles” is an engaging experience, but it is marred by overpriced microtransactions and marks an unfortunate trend for the game’s developer.
“Castles” is developed by Bethesda Softworks, a Maryland-based game development studio known for high-quality action role-playing games like “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” and “Fallout 4.” Outside of re-releases of “Skyrim,” development on their flagship series “The Elder Scrolls” has been the sole work of their publisher’s other studio with “The Elder Scrolls Online,” a 2014 MMORPG spinoff title. Their sole contribution to the series in the past 13 years was “The Elder Scrolls: Blades,” a critically panned 2019 mobile game mostly made up of reused assets from previous “Scrolls” titles. Compared to “Blades,” “Castles” is a masterpiece.
On a surface level, “Castles” is a beautiful game. It has a delightful art style and pleasant music with cute, wooden, doll-like characters that resemble the various fantasy peoples of the game’s world. It is undeniably charming, and that charm is one of the game’s major strengths. The gameplay is simple, yet interesting. At its core, “Castles” is about resource management, with the player having to ensure that their castle produces enough food and oil to continue running, marry subjects so that their castle’s population can grow and watch the happiness of their subjects to prevent them from killing each other, or worse, exiling or assassinating the monarch. With a simple system of relationships and character traits, each subject is useful for different professions and has dynamic interactions with other subjects, as well as being more or less suited to rule the kingdom when the current reign ends. For a mobile game that players are expected to pop into every once in a while and let idle for most of the day, “Castles” is surprisingly deep.
“Castles” is also rife with references to the series’ main titles, from choosing a side in ongoing conflicts between nations established way back in 1998’s “The Elder Scrolls II,” to responding to requests from your Emperor to support his war against rebels established in 2011’s “Skyrim.” Not merely references, “Castles” appeals to longtime fans by actually using the series’ wealth of fictional history to influence subject happiness and resource management.
However, the game is not all good. It is clear that the game was made with microtransactions in mind. While it is completely playable without them, the game constantly assaults players with in-game pop-ups recommending the “Emperor’s Pass,” a subscription that costs $4.99 a week, or $13.99 a month for extra rewards. And, of course, players are able to purchase “gems,” which can mercifully be earned in-game, albeit slowly, and can be used to buy “legendary packs” that contain random rewards. It is free to play, so there are few other ways for Bethesda to make money, none of them any less intrusive, but they are endemic. Rather than creating worthy sequels to the award-winning action role-playing games of the 2000s and early 2010s that won Bethesda their fame, the developer seems content to produce free mobile titles like “Castles,” and multiplayer facsimiles of their previous games for PC and consoles just as full of microtransactions as their mobile counterparts. These new Bethesda titles do not completely lack quality, but are hurt by a greed that hides the passion that was clearly put into their development.
“The Elder Scrolls: Castles” is an enjoyable game, and similar to a 2015 Bethesda mobile title, “Fallout Shelter.” If you are an “Elder Scrolls” fan or love the fantasy style, “Castles” is a good time waster, so long as you do not spend any money on it. However, if you do not care about playing a “Scrolls” title, the aforementioned “Fallout Shelter” has been time-tested for nine years, and proves a better game in the same genre, from a better era in Bethesda’s history.
Kevin Feinstein is a first-year majoring in English.
Featured image courtesy of Pexels.com.
