Kim is a top-down perspective open world RPG set in Rudyard Kipling’s colonial India

"Kim is a top-down perspective open world RPG set in Rudyard Kipling’s colonial India. A peculiar choice of setting to be sure and if that seems kinda familiar, Kipling is the guy who wrote The Jungle Book. The actual book-Book, not the Disney stuff.

The game is inspired by the eponymous Nobel-award winning novel, which tells the story of a street urchin named Kimball whose dusty and worn shoes you’ll be walking in during game-time. The game also isn’t some sort of linear adaptation or interactive graphic novelization either, it basically takes the setting, characters and events and allows you to play throughout as you see fit.

You’ll be taking over Kim’s life and directing his actions over the span of several in-game years during which you’ll decide whether to beg, steal of work for your daily bread however, you’ll most likely engage in a combination of the three, in order to have a place to sleep during nights and food in your belly.

Good mornin-afternoo-vening, dear viewers, welcome to a discovery of Kipling’s colonial India seen through the eyes and actions of one of his characters, as brought to us by the devs over at The Secret Games Company.

This is a fascinating setting for a RPG game, mainly due to the fact that it is, at least to my knowledge, a very little used one in the overall medium of games, as well as a setting not very well known in the Western mainstream. And since I am a big student of history, this was a major pull for me.

Also since it is set towards the end of the 19th century in colonial India, it is so far removed from modern times and Western urban settings, as well as the more traditional fantasy setting, that it might just as well be a strange new world, relatively fresh out of it’s Industrial Revolution period which has a striking resemblance to our reality, but is still quite engrossingly foreign.

Whilst the top-down perspective wasn’t a hook for me, the idea of playing a RPG that was less about stat and skill optimization and more about the sheer exhilaration of discovery and exploration really appealed to me and functioned as a much-needed break from the questing, killing and looting of corpses I usually find myself knee-deep in during my usual gaming activities.

Besides the exploration aspect, which is actually implemented as a gameplay mechanic as well - Kim is mainly about day-to-day survival, but in a very down-to-earth sort of way, meaning that your main worries are to make sure you have something to eat and a place to sleep regularly - the game offering many approaches to both these aspects, as well as keeping an eye on your health since since living on the streets will also get sick eventually.

Before I continue though I have to mention that the choice of hand-painted art style and the choice of color shades help a great deal with immersing you in the atmosphere. It’s true that we don’t have smellovision capabilities - yet - because I trust that would’ve been by far the most striking aspect of colonial India to the senses, but the environmental sounds and the laid back and up-bead soundtrack adds to this sense of slow immersion and quiet exploration.

The game makes it very clear that it puts all the decision-making in your hands. There are a lot of quests that Kim can undertake - some of them being time-sensitive - so your choices of how Kim leads his day-to-day life will directly influence how you go about adventuring and exploring the world around you, and there are quite a few interesting avenues that you can take Kim on.

There is a lot of talking and a lot of decision-making involved in the game, as you’ll see once I jump into the gameplay commentary part of video, and I might jump over them somewhat faster than you should, this is due to the fact that I’ve restarted the game for the benefit of this video and showing you the beginning of the game as a way of hooking you because if you’ll dig the start, you’ll surely like the rest. So without further make sure to watch the video I embedded at the start of the post since it has quite a bit of useful gameplay commentary."

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Kim on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/433400/Kim/

Kim on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/kim

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