If a consensus gleaned from this ever-dwindling cohort of games journalists can still be considered statistically significant, the read on Kingdom Come: Deliverance II so far has been that it’s actually not all that reactionary? Just another history-infused open world romp like its predecessor, really; filled with the standard open world accoutrements. For this to be surprising, you would have to first be familiar with the opinions of Daniel Vávra, the series’ outspoken Creative Director who has previously, among several other things, claimed that “multiculturalism is in direct conflict with diversity.” I would argue you’d also need to have lost sight of how right wing-coded most such videogames already are—but it’s true that no character in KC:D2 breaks the 4th wall to speechify about the importance of ethnonationalism. And so the reviews have mostly come back with the couched tone of a cold war diplomatic cable on some proxy nation’s stability: ‘some lingering concerns with the regime’s stance on women, but we think we can be comfortable backing it.’
What was once parochial becomes a regional player, then. This is Kingdom Come’s “Witcher 3 moment,” as Kirk McKeand has put it, which I take to mean the instant something achieves the critical mass of polish and popular awareness to level-up commercially (see, recently: Elden Ring). It also means something that might, as McKeand suggests, produce “for the Czech game development scene” what the other game did for Poland (e.g: a burgeoning industry, a Netflix series, a cultural export transcending borders). Upon reaching those rarified airs, it’s generally expected that a series will button things up a bit: say, ditching the collectible cards the first Witcher game provides of female characters the player sleeps with. For its part, Kingdom Come has precisely one Black character in it now, and the perk the player gets after having sex is no longer called “Alpha Male.”
But the invocation of nationalism remains as fraught as it was for CD Projekt’s series; it’s no coincidence that many of Vávra’s previous diatribes centered on the inclusion of people of color in The Witcher, which he describes as “a Polish game, based on Polish traditions, which presents to the world Polish reality” (notwithstanding that said world is fictional, and includes necromancers and djinn in among its references to Slavic folklore). Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, which has also been billed as “Skyrim but without the dragons,” is more couched in stolid historicism, though this can be belied somewhat by its bid for broader appeal. In the game’s rollicking commercial spot, Henry of Skalitz, man-at-arms, is bandied about in disorienting Snorricam between 15th century scenes—from dance, to duel, to feast, to battlefield and back again. But while Commercial Henry can quickly throw on a helmet; Game Henry cannot do so before first donning a padded coif, to mitigate pressure points and cushion incoming blows. The “handgonne” that Commercial Henry quickdraws against a charging knight takes a historically accurate 15 seconds to load and ignite in game, and can’t hit the broad side of a barn. All that to say: these are not the kind of games you’d expect to command the giddy audience that the ad’s medieval-themed Grand Theft Auto presupposes.
“Meet real historical characters and experience the genuine look and feel of medieval Bohemia,” reads one of the original game’s bullet points, and indeed I have learned an appreciable bit about medieval Czech history via KC:D2. I’d possessed a passing familiarity with Jan Hus (he of the Hussites), but the game’s heroic reveals of Jan Žižka and Dry Devil landed on me like the Better Man trailer on any of the nonplussed Americans still trying to figure out who Robbie Williams is and why he's played by a monkey. The historical setting—Bohemia, 1403, as lords and mercenaries trade castles and allies between the forces loyal to Wenceslas and the invading Sigismund—is highly wrought, and the nativism has been more or less smoothed out by the sequel's effort to include more angles on the conflict.
But as I've written previously, an open world tends to engender a very cavalier attitude in its tourists. It’s a thought that first occurred to me while veering my mount off course in Elden Ring, “...to lean over and lump an enemy on the side of the head as I drive by…just to fill the empty moment with a small reassertion of control, a little microaggression.” And Kingdom Come would seem to agree. After its opening in mediares, we fall in with Henry and the rest of the retinue trailing his Lord, Hans Capon, as he sits up in the saddle and outstretches his arms to embrace the possibilities splayed before him in the surrounding region of Trosky Castle. “We can finally enjoy some adventure,” he exhorts Henry/us, “see a bit of the world, meet new women, and simply have some fun?!” The exchange continues a few moments later:
CAPON: “Well, Henry? Looking forward to new adventures? Adventures that will become the stuff of legends?”
HENRY (affirmative): “Of course I am! We’ll show them what fine fellows have shown up on their doorstep!”
CAPON: “You bet we will. We’ll hand over our important message and then hop, skip to the local tavern. We’ll drink to our success and chase some local wenches, eh? Heheh!”
Like a true open world gamer himself, within minutes Hans is straying from the mission, conscripting Henry to creep through reeds to spy on bathing women. I didn't know then that Hans is eventually revealed to be one of the game’s same-sex romance options, newly introduced in the sequel and to much gnashing of bigoted teeth, apparently. But neither this, nor the murder of the rest of the party by bandits while the two are away, much troubles the prevailing atmosphere of a messy and prolonged stag do. That's for better and worse, and certainly deliberate. The Warhorse team have leveraged the natural rapport of their English leads, Tom McKay and Luke Dale, to great effect; in a series of filmed promo spots the two bring the bachelor party vibe to Kutná Hora (contemporary of the game’s Kuttenberg), and make a demonstration of medieval weaponry feel that much more like an IPAs-and-axe-throwing joint. The game never sings quite as well when the two of them aren't pushing and pulling at each other, Henry yanked this way and that by bro-code and feudal obligation, alternately.
In true chivalrous fashion, this dynamic reaches its acme with what is essentially a quest to climb a tower and rescue a princess (the ever-petulant Hans) before the clock strikes twelve—at which point he will be hung. But having been only recently sprung from prison himself, Henry is without money or weaponry, and so discretion must by necessity prove the better part of valor. There are several ways to slip Hans from the noose (personally, I spent hours reading abstruse alchemical texts and distilling brews while half-registering the bell’s tolling). But my favorite plays out as a sort of trade-up game: Henry’s own shoes for a lockpick, a lockpick for a remedy, a remedy for access, etc. Whenever circumstances conspire to deprive Henry of his equipment and freedom of motion, the game’s immaculate period treatments can take the fore, from Trosky Castle's maze of switchback chambers to the strictures of the feudal order.
This is the inverse of the open world’s dynamic which—if you’ll permit me to cherry pick from better critics—resembles Andrea Long Chu’s recent definition of the so-called far-center: ”liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice.” Within the open world, all those discrete microaggressions comprise the small donors of capital-C Content. Bandits to slay, people to rob, sums to be gambled, none of it to any end save personal entertainment and the accrual of more stuff.
Such activities, naturally, do not further the sense that one is contributing to the Bohemian homeland defensive effort. The vagaries are only compounded when Henry and Hans, through a series of double-crosses that beggar belief, end up fighting alongside the very mercenaries who killed their party. Subsequent “assemble a team” quests round out the group with a series of drunks, maniacs, and common thugs. Fully formed, The Devil's Pack, which includes Žižka, make for strange bedfellows–ostensibly partisans of Wenceslas, given to the same raping and pillaging Sigismunds’ are often cited for, only this time played for laughs.
In fact, most characters in KC:DII mock Henry on those occasions when he makes an appeal for the rightfulness of Wenceslas IV, his notional king. Lords of any stripe are merely self-interested schemers, goes the argument; it’s arch naivete for Henry to think rightfulness is anyone’s purview, let alone a bastard raised by a blacksmith. Mercenarianism is of course itself historical, and among the mercenaries themselves this kind of cynical pragmatism is expected. But the ubiquity of the point of view feels distinctly modern, somewhat clouding any exhibition of Bohemian chauvanism. That’s all fine and fair enough. But chauvanism, in its historical sense, is only Kingdom Come's nominal export—it's male chauvanism that truly transcends its borders, ranging out on horseback across the open world.
The word’s possibly mythological patron saint, Nicolas Chauvin, was a farmer-soldier who proudly boasted of the glories of Napoleon's empire, and now gives his name to that cocktail of jingoism and revanchist fervor. But the semantic shift to the misogynistic sense of the word in the 20th century should not be mistaken for a declination, or even much of a departure. Chauvanism itself is, after all, “a whole culture,” as Yoram Bronowski wrote in September 2001. No less powerful a culture as can bridge the divide between Russia and the United States, as we’re coming to learn. But most of us are by now acquainted with the manosphere’s connective potency, its ability to bring together comedians, podcasters, human traffickers, billionaires, and bloggers. As an erstwhile fan of MMA, I feel like I’ve had a front row seat to this, watching as American and Saudi interests align around the latest exploits of virulently conservative, beard-sporting Dagestani wrestlers.
Perhaps it’s on account of that MMA habit that before I’d even played Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, I’d been suggested Youtube clips of the games (there’s much crossover appeal between modern martial arts and practitioners of “HEMA,” or Historical European Martial Arts). In the thumbnail of one of them, a blood-spattered Henry holds a woman in a rear-naked choke–MMA-style, incidentally, with the arms figure-foured. The caption reads: “I just wanted to hug her” (the full dialogue, which Henry will speak if you try and fail to talk your way out of being witnessed strangling a woman, is: “I just wanted to hug her. To surprise her from behind. Women love that, I’ve heard”). Women of the medieval ages, as the game’s codex helpfully describes, did not enjoy much agency, but the permissivity of the open world video game structure only makes them that much more immiserated.
Not so for our dear Henry. For all the moments when he finds himself in a stockade or sleeping in a sty, there's the whiplash of his subsequent elevation back to status. No sooner do you resolve the Trosky prison debacle than you’re furnished with a new horse and sent on campaign (from there, straight into and out of another prison, naturally). Later, after having infiltrated one of Sigismund’s camps, Henry is immediately given an extremely sensitive task by its commander. Upon its completion, he’s promoted on the spot. This is videogame logic, yes. But it’s also the animating logic of white male chauvinism, whether it takes shape within The Devil's Pack or Trump's cabinet.
What they have in common is a rhetoric—one that, as Ian Danskin recently wrote, “is one without substance, one of infinite flexibility, that offers nothing more than the promise that you will get everything you want, and that directs your rage at something other than yourself.” Or, in KC:DII's parlance: “the stronger dog fucks the bitches. ” It's something of an antimantra, seethed at Henry from the mouths of multiple antagonists. The counter message would seem to be obviated by the logic of the videogame's progression—at some point, the player is going to become the stronger dog. But the portrayal of the Hussites’ guerrilla warfare, and the struggles of its hand-to-hand combat seem to be an attempt to articulate it: stronger dog or no, with cunning and chaos at play, it may not matter. It’s of a kind with movies like The King, or Outlaw King, which pose that victory is hardscrabble, something to prise away with teeth and claws. Dirty tactics are sanctioned; history can always be retroactively and cynically rewritten to ascribe virtue to the victorious, ex post facto.
This makes the dating of Kingdom Come, at the naissance of the western firearm, particularly choice. The handgonne, particularly in its use in the ambush, evokes the leveling effect of modern weaponry, and foretells the end of the martial class of Bellatores which Hans (characteristically lecturing Henry on the feudal order so as to avoid having to help with a chore) so proudly ascribes to himself. But a little over a decade after the events of the game, at Agincourt, thousands of French nobles succumbed to a much more modest invention: the English longbow. To Bruce Robbins, a literary scholar, this is one of the first times that atrocity, as a concept, was revealed across class, as English nobles found more fellow-feeling with their dead French counterparts than their own countrymen. Thusly, as Robbins puts it, “atrocity becomes visible not from below, but above.” It requires a feeling of dignity, first and foremost, something your average medieval serf was not expected to possess. Nor was it meted out evenly between the genders, as Kingdom Come illustrates, in ways both diegetic and decidedly not.
Atrocity is a recurrent feature of KC:DII’s 15th century Bohemia, as one would expect. We witness the aftermath of sieges, raids, and in one dramatic case, the beginning of a pogram within Kuttenberg's Jewish quarter. But perhaps the most pivotal atrocities are the ones the player is dared to commit. Late in the game, prior to attacking a castle, Dry Devil argues with Henry about the need to ransack a neighboring village to draw out the soldiers. If Henry objects to the killing of innocents, the Devil goes nearly apoplectic that more resultant risk might fall on “his men.” To him, there is only one visible atrocity: the one framed by chauvinism's sympathies, the one from above.
Gerard de Puymege, who literally wrote the book on Chauvin, ends it (per Bronowski) “with a quote from the German philosopher Karl Krause, who says that it is not xenophobia but smug self-love that is the most repugnant feature of chauvinism.” It is the impulse to draw one’s borders around the lowest common denominator of people who you can see yourself in, and turn guns outward, like the vozová hradba, precursors to the tank whose use Jan Žižka pioneered in the Hussite Wars (see? I am learning things). That’s how Vávra can write, without a shred of self-awareness, that diversity is “the option to choose freely what I like,” an argument so profoundly solipsistic that it manages to obliviate the very existence of other people, in Kuttenberg or Kenya alike. He and his ilk only ever choose one thing, no matter how much they dress it up. As one villain, dying from a crossbow cheap shot, tells Henry: “You know lad…under all the armor and finery, you will only ever find a man.”
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Nick Capozzoli is an architect and critic.