Below the cloth hall in the main square of Krakow, Poland, there is a museum built around an archeological site of the city’s long-vanished original structure. In it, you walk through an excavation, looking down the clear pathways at the dug-out trodden paths archeologists found below, where hundreds of years before people walked to do their shopping and sell goods and socialize. The long hallway of reconstructed stalls makes you feel like you're there, walking through medieval Krakow, filling in the elements now missing: the weather, the people. Through this replicated, built environment, you are brought back into a world that doesn't exist anymore—or an approximation of it, at least.

In a different museum exhibit, Pompeii: Life and Death in the Shadow of Vesuvius, visitors are ushered into a small room with large video screens on every wall. The door is closed, and the screens play, over the course of a few minutes, a computer-generated video of what it would have looked like when the volcano erupted. The effect is horrifying. The floor shakes, the sound booms, the volcano fills the room with awful red light—and then there is grim quiet as the ash settles, as the lively city goes grey, as things that were defined become indistinct. When you emerge from that room you are sent right back into the exhibit, where you can look at the curled-up casts of the dead with new eyes, realizing how torturous their last moments would have been and remembering the look of the sky.

There are great swaths of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II that feel like these museums. It's a dollhouse of historical detail, a testament to the dedication and nerdiness of the developers that they've been able to recreate to such a meticulous extent the landscape of 15th-century Bohemia and the lives that its people would have lived. It does, in many ways, have the same effect of walking through that cloth hall. The player is brought into this world that doesn't exist anymore and is asked to learn from it, to gain some level of instinctive understanding that is not possible through imagination alone. 

This is illustrated through the level and complexity of Deliverance II’s immersive sim systems. It models basically everything it can get away with: alchemy, blacksmithing, swordplay, horseback riding, lockpicking and pickpocketing, bathing, cooking. It is instance after instance of interactive exhibit: not generative, but patterned, with models of aspects of this historical life built on and expanded and dropped throughout the world, where Henry can find them and engage with them. Smithing a sword in Deliverance II feels in many ways like sifting through a sandbox to learn about fossils, or like getting zapped at the aquarium to learn how it feels to get shocked by an electric eel. The attempt to genuinely recreate what a version of one of these crafts may have been like is interesting and engaging.

But it also makes clear the limitations of these systems. There is no physical component to a videogame except for the rote motions of a keyboard or controller: there are no sensory aspects outside of vision, audio, and haptic feedback. A game can model aspects of what smithing a sword might have been like, but it cannot mimic the heat of the forge or the weight of the hammer or the response of the whetstone. A player may come out of Deliverance II with a more complex understanding of what blacksmithing entails, but they will not come out with a more complex feeling of it. 

Many of Deliverance II’s weaknesses come from that dissonance between its creators' approach to their subject, the mechanics, and what they're actually capable of providing to the player. The grueling combat system is the best example of this: the early hours of the game where Henry's stats are low and he's still learning combat are actively miserable. In attempting to model a realistic version of what medieval sword fighting would have been like, with stances and parries and a demanding level of enemy responsiveness, what Deliverance II instead creates is a major mechanic that is neither fun nor intuitive, andlacking any sort of illustrative, experiential component that could justify the complexity. It's not hard to imagine a museum exhibit with foam swords and a dummy, where you could be instructed in similar stances and anticipatory responses and which would ring truer than what Deliverance II is capable of recreating digitally. 

For that reason, the game strains at the seams. The menus are crammed with text, barely navigable. The UI is simple to the point of unhelpful. Some aspects of the game are hardly explained (immersive sim! figure it out as you go!) while others are the exact opposite (here's five paragraphs of historical research on every new enemy you meet!). It doesn't always seem like it knows what it wants to be—is it an epic story of nobles and knights or is it a pastoral village simulator? Is Henry a scripted character on an urgent mission or some guy fucking around in the woods? Is the player supposed to be engaging with the landscape, the world, the history—or is the player supposed to be playing? You can never quite tell if the point of the game is to have fun. It seems sometimes like the point of the game is to show you that you would probably die in medieval Bohemia.

Deliverance II is a fascinating and beautifully crafted game with a genuinely admirable eye for historicism. It is also, perhaps, crippled by its medium. What it would like to be is a walk through a bygone past; the experiential equivalent of a stroll in the fields, a brutal fight, or a long, drunken night. It would like to bring you, the player, to the place and time it has such a visible love for, which it has put so much effort into researching and recreating. But in the meantime, to its disappointment, it must be a videogame. 

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Maddi Chilton is a writer, a columnist for Unwinnable, and an internet artifact. You can find her on Bluesky.