Inti Creates has released some truly amazing games over the years, but not everything the developer has produced has been golden. Some releases feel like they lack the polish and shine of the older works, and while Inti Creates keeps trying new things, not everything manages to be great. Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster seemed to be an ambitious hybrid style RPG that could reinvigorate the studio, but the result is the most disappointing game I have played yet from Inti Creates.
It is not that the game controls poorly or has performance issues. No, the real issue here is just how tedious and dull the gameplay is. Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster is ostensibly a mix of action RPG and kingdom builder, but this is a case where Inti Creates clearly was trying to do something that was just not working. It is a shame, as I saw potential in this title, it could have been good, but there is just nothing that clicks here to make it work.
There is a narrative present, or rather a premise of restoring a fallen kingdom , but it really just feels like window dressing more than anything and has no real substance, even when talking to NPCs. This is especially disappointing with how the NPCs in previous Inti Creates games could actually stand out well. Here though, they are just window dressing and nothing more.
Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster has two main aspects to it, adventuring into dungeons and fighting enemies, and building your kingdom. Both had great potential but just did not mix well and failed to come together in a meaningful way. Exploring dungeons is all about getting resources and taking out monsters, but also exposes how desolate the environments are and how uninspired everything feels.
There is nothing that stands out visually, and the dungeons just do not have any meaningful design, especially as they are almost all identical. You go through a variety of floors with only minor changes in them, defeat every enemy with little variety and then just repeat. It is monotonous and quickly grows dull, which made me not want to keep playing. You can skip some floors, but this comes at the risk of missing important rewards you need for the kingdom building, forcing you to do the mindless loop.
The kingdom building is not that much better either, as it is just a very passive system that has you select a structure based on what materials you have. Deciding where to put it is not even as much of a concern, and what we were left with was a deeply shallow system that just seems to be there to justify the dungeon loop, when in reality both systems drag each other down. It would not be so bad if the action parts were more fun, but when the developers made a point of hyping up the different classes, only for them to not really affect gameplay that much, it really feels like a swing and a miss, since everything just descends into spamming attacks without effort. All the different classes do is affect how you spam your attacks.
Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster could have been good, but it needed better dungeon design, and combat that didn’t feel like a slog. There is no real sense of progression either and it all just feels kind of there. The kingdom building does give some stat boosts, but it is handled so poorly that it feels unneeded. If the character progression and kingdom building were more thought out, this could have been better.
Inti Creates could have had something great with Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster, as there were good ideas. But the visuals are bland and the soundtrack is abysmal, and the gameplay is a slog. Even the side quests offer no variety and it all results in a game that is a stain on a great publisher. Skip Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster and look at older Inti Creates games instead.
Disclaimer: A review key was provided