The Guild: Europa 1410 is a medieval strategy reboot that plays like a fussy Kingdom Come boardgame

Behold the Last Train Home studio's take on Kuttenberg

The Guild: Europa 1410 is a reboot of 4HEAD's strategy game Europa 1400: The Guild from 2002, created by the studio behind the well-regarded World War sim Last Train Home. My first hurdle in the Steam demo is working out who and where the hell I am. The demo treats you to a slice of Kuttenberg, a Czech city made famous to a lot of non-Czech people by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2: at a glance, it could be the Warhorse RPG with a top-down mod.

It gives you wheel-churned roads among houses of wattle and daub; vegetable patches and windmills and furnaces roamed by dozens of 'living, breathing' folk in authentically muted period attire. All of it basking beneath a day-night cycle and a spread of weather conditions. All of it pleasantly hard to decipher from bird's eye view, though there's a highlighting function to boil away the scene-setting.

Which of those fine burghers am I? I pause the game and run the camera down the alleyways, searching for an icon with my heraldry, then discover the zoom-to-location button in the corner of my character window. Ah, there you are. What on earth are you doing out there, visiting some kind of circus supply business? You're supposed to be an alchemist.

I watch my reassuringly stout, 29-year-old potion-brewer amble back within the walls and embark on an aimless tour of the marketplace. I experiment with a menu of "personal actions", such as heading to a guildhall for training. According to the demo's character selection screens, alchemy is a shady practice, and I wonder whether my lackadaisical quack might get pounced upon by the guards while memorising the uses of Deadly Nightshade. I poke and prod at the personal action screen, seeking more direct control, and it slowly dawns on me that I'm wasting precious time I should be spending filling up grid-based shop inventories with jars of paint.

The Guild is not, despite appearances, a single character RPG; it's a turn-based dynastic trading boardgame that is played largely in menus, with each turn lasting a single day in real time (although the days are also, confusingly, whole seasons).

The exact positioning and behaviour of entities within the world isn't insignificant, but going by the demo, a lot of the detail is abstracted away into the process of moving items between boxes, pressing upgrade buttons given appropriate resources, and adjusting sliders to make angry red minus signs evaporate. The virtuoso impression of an organic, cohesive metropolis cracks on scrutiny. Building interiors are effectively submenus, for example. You can't just slide the camera through the walls, following people through doors; you press a doorhandle icon instead.

Above all, it's a game about ensuring you manufacture and sell enough goods to cover your costs and pay your taxes. I found the demo absorbing enough, but also a bit disappointing. From the screens and trailer, I was expecting a medieval life simulation in which I could all but smell the manure and stale beer; instead, I feel a little like I'm mastering ye olde Microsofte Excelle.

Image credit: THQ Nordic

I'm basing this on an hour with the game, in fairness, and there are a lot of systems to pick at, including a range of dynastic options that compare to the likes of Crusader Kings 3. You can seek office after buttering up noteworthy residents, clawing your way to the rank of mayor or bishop. You can pass weird laws and/or deal with their effects. You can hire a range of workers and treat them well or very badly, again care of the medium of sliders. You can surveil your neighbours, once you've equipped your upgradeable hovel with a spyglass.

There's the question of finding love and spawning an heir, which might involve competing with appointed "rivals" for a wealthy magnate's affections. There's also an investigation subgame in which you gather evidence of crimes, trying to land your opponents in court; worth testing out, I reckon, if only so you can learn how to cheat justice yourself.

It's too early to say how consequential many of these systems are, but I agree with Fraser Brown (Rest in PCG) that a lot of it feels incidental, next to filling your shelves and monitoring price changes. I do like how location broadly affects your business. Some character live out in the fields and meadows, the better to gather timber or other resources needed for their professions, but this means they're more reliant on carts to flog their goods in the market - and the more areas carts pass through, the greater the odds of a robbery.

Image credit: THQ Nordic

I think if you fire up the demo for The Guild: Europa 1410 without any expectation of playing a modern-day life sim RPG, you'll enjoy it a lot more. It's worth spelling out that the original game launched at a time when expectations for these genres were very different; if I were a returning player, I might have been less jarred by the mixture of mechanics in the demo.

At worst, however, Europa 1410's updated high fidelity portrayal of medieval life only make its dustier, creakier elements less palatable. I want to live in this burgeoning, nicely observed world, but the world sort of just wants me to open my ledger and ensure the carts arrive on time.