You are just walking about, and eat some mushrooms just on the ground and…don’t die from it thankfully. Instead you summon a mushroom…wizard(?!) who may just be a hallucination who guides you to become greater than you were, by becoming rich.
However, the real wealth comes in spreading it around, using the coins you’ve picked up to hire some downtrodden…hobos? It’s an interesting choice of word, given it’s a medieval fantasy setting, not a late 1800’s railway. Anyway, you train them to become archers, and train builders to get your walls up to survive the first night. When darkness falls, the portals will release monsters to come down both lanes to the east and west of town, and will take the coins of your people if they fall, turning them back to regular hobos. You’re not able to help defend against the night waves, relying entirely on the defenses you built during the day in order to ensure your survival.
Provided you survive, the builders will repair walls come day, and you can hunt animals for coins, recruit more hobos, and mark trees for cutting. Clearing the trees down the lanes will enable you to build additional walls, as well as towers for your archers, moving closer to the enemy portals, and to an endgame that is beyond what the limited demo seemed to be able to show. You’re also able to upgrade your central building, allowing you to further build your town by adding farms for passive income and other types of units.
You might find a chest while hunting during the day which will give a random trait and some coins, or, stronger boss-style monsters that require a bit of kiting since they fight back. The combat itself is fairly basic since all you can really do is move and shoot. This means you largely walk a few steps away from the monster, fire, and repeat until dead. They do have some telegraphs for attacks to dodge, but following this strategy also tends to move you out of the way of most or only require a few extra steps. Even if you get hit, as long as it’s not too often, you’ll still net more coins from the kill than you lost.
The game is still a demo and the devs are asking for feedback, as well as promising that this isn’t the final product. Hopefully they’ll add a UI indicator for how many coins you have. The pouch that pops up when you gain or spend is a nice touch, but it’s fairly hard to tell how many you have on you after the first few. Also, hopefully XP and hunting in general during the day get added to the end of the tutorial, it’s kinda vague what you’re supposed to do as is.
The Monarch’s demo sadly doesn’t seem to still be available, even if searching for it and seeing an option for the demo in Steam’s search. It’s got a Q2 launch window, but no hard date set yet. Perhaps joining their Discord will enable you to help with that, if this game sounds like your sort of thing.