Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 hands-on preview – an historic RPG sequel
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The sequel to historical role-playing game Kingdom Come: Deliverance is even prettier and more realistic than ever, and has a healthy obsession with cleanliness. Playing Skyrim, Baldur’s Gate, The Witcher, or any of the other legion of role-players with Tolkien-esque settings you get a reassuring sense of olde worlde charm, filled with castles, horse riding, and potion drinking. Yes, there’s magic and mystical beasts, but what’s really missing from the historical side of their recreations of the virtual dark ages is the sense of utter, mud-soaked squalor.
![[Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 screenshot of first person combat]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_217473551-3fa4.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
Released in 2018, Kingdom Come: Deliverance more than made up for other role-playing games’ shortcomings in that department, by presenting players with a far grittier and more accurate representation of the medieval world. Set in Bohemia in the early 1400s, it treated players to a world with no wizards and griffons, but one where it was a job just to stay clean and presentable, with visits to the public baths and tailor absolutely essential if your character, Henry, wished to maintain his presence in polite society.
That’s because 15th century Europe was obsessed with social status, believing God had made everyone just as they were. It meant if you were born a peasant, that was your lot in life, and the aristocracy felt both socially and morally superior. That made Henry, the bastard son of a nobleman and a peasant, something of a conundrum.
He ends up as bodyguard to minor noble, Lord Hans Capon, and given how war torn and feudal Bohemia was during that period, it’s work that offers a lot of potential for misadventure. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 picks up the story just after the first instalment finished, with Henry accompanying Hans and his small retinue on a mission to take an important message to a local lord. As in the first game, things don’t go smoothly.
