Queen’s Domain, a two-person heir to FromSoftware’s King’s Field, becomes a sleeper hit

Before FromSoftware became the studio of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, it made King’s Field: slow, unforgiving dungeon crawls seen through the hero’s own eyes, where every corridor was a question and every swing of a sword spent a little of a finite stamina bar. The company moved on to bigger things, and the form it pioneered has lived on mostly in small, devoted indie projects. Queen’s Domain, the new RPG from Freshly Baked Games, a studio made up of just two developers, picks up that thread without irony, and in its first days on sale it has become one of the more unexpected word-of-mouth successes of the season.

The idea at its centre is a sword that doubles as a pair of wings. Washed ashore on the Isle of Neasied in search of a missing father, the player carries the Holy Sword Endu, which unfurls feathered blades and lets them take flight from platform to platform across an island whose routes fold back into one another. Upgrades let those flights reach further, which turns distance itself into something the player earns. It is a traversal answer to an old genre whose defining question was always less whether you could win the next fight than whether you could make it out alive.

Pale creatures stalk overgrown stone ruins beneath a tower on the Isle of Neasied in Queen’s Domain — Image: Freshly Baked Games / Future Friends Games

Around that idea sits a deliberately old-fashioned combat model: a classic stamina meter, charged attacks, weapon-specific specials and secondary throwing weapons. The publisher counts more than 50 melee weapons to find and upgrade, upwards of 20 kinds of throwables and over 100 enemies, mini-bosses and bosses, with levelling handled through XP and, charmingly, through eating food that raises your stats. The look is a grainy, hand-tuned retro-fantasy texture, closer to a half-remembered late-1990s console memory than to a pixel-art pastiche.

The size of the team is what makes the reception notable. Freshly Baked Games is Eric and Bradley, two independent developers who released the ambient exploration game The New Flesh in the summer of 2025 before turning to this project. Publisher Future Friends Games, founded in 2017 and behind indie releases such as CloverPit, Exo One and Slots & Daggers, says the game has reached the Steam and Switch 2 bestseller charts and gathered more than 1,200 Steam user reviews, 95% of them positive. Its launch note also rounds up early praise, including GameSpot predicting a “cult classic” and Immortality creator Sam Barlow saying it is “rocketing into my GOTY list”.

An armoured knight boss, the Noble Sentinel, charges across a sea causeway in Queen’s Domain — Image: Freshly Baked Games / Future Friends Games

Queen’s Domain launched on Friday, October 30 on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. On Steam it supports English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Simplified Chinese, and the publisher puts a typical playthrough at 40 hours or more.

FromSoftware left this kind of game behind decades ago to build something bigger. Two developers have now gone back for it, and the old corridors, it turns out, still have an audience willing to get lost in them.

Tags: indie games, action RPGs, FromSoftware, Freshly Baked Games, Future Friends Games, King's Field