Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

header is screenshot from Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

This article discusses plot details from throughout Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.

There’s a system in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II where Henry, the game’s protagonist, emerges from a fight visibly soaked in blood. If he doesn’t stop by a water trough to splash himself clean or visit a bathhouse or stream to wash his clothes and armour, passersby will exclaim in surprise at the grimy killer in their midst. A shopkeeper may be put off by Henry’s appearance when he enters a conversation and attempts to haggle over the price of new boots with gore still clinging to his face. A farmer or miller may swear an oath to god as a man dripping red strolls past them. Nobody in the game, it turns out, is willing to accept a blood-soaked man as just another member of their society.

This presents a recurring problem for Henry. Though Deliverance II is a role-playing game that allows problems to be solved by smooth talking and non-confrontational thievery, it’s also a game where violence readily erupts due to the tensions at the heart of its setting: The chaotic early 15th-century Kingdom of Bohemia. Armed bandits stalk the wilderness that stretches out in lush forests and rolling fields between villages and towns. Prickly guardsmen are ready to draw swords at perceived insults or trespasses. As evidenced by patrolling soldiers, corpses swinging beneath tree branches, and the sight of razed burghs, it’s the wars fought between lords loyal to the deposed King Wenceslas IV and his rival, King Sigismund, that really highlight the danger of the time. Henry, no matter how he’s guided by the player, is regularly involved in all of the conflicts mentioned above. He can’t talk or sneak his way past every fight. And, as a result, he spends a good amount of time smeared with his own and other people’s blood.

The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance took place during this same era. It followed Henry’s journey to avenge the death of his parents and the destruction of his home following a raid by Sigismund’s forces, ending with him learning he’s the illegitimate son of a local lord and jumping up the social ladder to find himself, by game’s end, rubbing armoured shoulders with Bohemian nobility. Its depiction of the past was distinctly coloured by an unsavoury romantic nationalism I wrote about back in 2018, linked here to spare the need to relitigate my reading of its narrative.

The prospect of a sequel to a game like Deliverance is both compelling, then, and fraught because it represents an opportunity to either continue down the same path or swerve away from the implications of what came before. Basically: The fundamental question underlying so much historical fiction is what its creators choose to excavate from the past. The fundamental question of so many videogame sequels is how they look to iterate on or depart from their predecessor. There’s no such thing as a value neutral decision in either medium, and in the case of a Deliverance sequel, the choices of what’s prioritized in a second jaunt through its maker’s version of an “authentic open-world medieval Europe” is telling of its priorities.

Deliverance II, at first, appears to carry on right where the first game left off, in both tone and plot. Henry and the young Lord Hans Capon are tasked with delivering a letter to a Bohemian noble whose support would help Capon and his allies in their fight to restore King Wenceslas to the throne. The early hours of the game play out like a roaming bachelor party, Henry and Hans enjoying a gentleman’s duel at a lakeside camp as an introduction to Deliverance II’s melee combat before learning the game’s stealth systems through a sequence where they quietly sneak through the reeds of a lake to spy on a group of bathing women. Henry and Hans giggle and ogle like they’re in a forgotten Porky’s prequel before the sex comedy mood is decidedly soured by the appearance of mounted soldiers who massacre the boy’s companions and attempt to rape one of the women before a last-minute intercession by their leader.

This kind of tonal whiplash reads as a statement of intent when viewed in the context of the plot to unfold over the next several dozen hours, foreshadowing a general interest in the terror and misery of war rather than a narrower, retrograde worldview. Variants of its dopey, boys-will-be-boys sex pestilence continue to pop up to lesser degrees throughout the game, and its sense of humour largely remains at frat level, but, on the whole, it chooses to shift its focus elsewhere as the shape of its plot coheres.

There’s a sense of self-conscious overcorrection at times. Early in the game, an innkeeper asks Henry to stop a fight from breaking out between a group of xenophobic Bohemians and Cuman mercenaries, the latter talking amongst themselves and hoping for a peaceful meal. Fail to defuse the situation and Henry can end up brawling with the Bohemians to defend the foreign soldiers—a far cry in depiction from the Cumans who served largely as sword-fighting fodder in the past game. Elsewhere, there’s a camp of Roma travelers whose culture and marginalized position in society is stressed through conversation with its members. Though she’s overly defined by the gendered tragedy of her backstory, the game also includes the steel-spined Katherine, who never entirely falls into the easy role of mandatory love interest, and Musa of Mali, an African Muslim traveller who, at one point, faces near-deadly prejudice from his erstwhile allies.

Other examples centre far more subtly on refuting the idea, suggested by the first game, of an exclusionary definition of who can be considered “truly” Bohemian. The Jewish population of the largest city modelled in Deliverance II, Kuttenberg, is crucial to the plot. They’re scapegoated for political advantage in one of the most horrific sequences of the game—the outbreak of what now be called a pogrom—and Henry and one of the Kuttenberg Jews’ overlapping parentage is used to break down what seem like socially immutable distinctions in class and religious identity. Nearby Christian nations Poland and Hungary are given more intimate, if sophomoric, portrayal here, too, with a band of scrappy outlaws that resemble a sort of medieval Dirty Dozen including an incorrigible Polish womanizer who can’t speak Czech and his erstwhile translator, a moustachioed, good-natured Hungarian.

Rather than keep Sigismund, whose “foreignness” as King of Hungary and Croatia, and his army, which includes a large number of Cuman mercenaries, at an unknowable remove, Deliverance II shows their humanity by putting Henry face-to-face with his former enemies. Aside from the brawl at the inn mentioned above, a Cuman contingent is shown in an army camp Henry sneaks into, presented simply as people from a different land, now far from home and looked down upon by many of their military companions. (At one point, if Henry is scholarly enough, he can correct a soldier who mistakenly believes the Cumans are “pagans.”) Sigismund himself is also foregrounded as a character, depicted as a conflicted man whose worst choices are motivated less by moustache-twirling evil than a sense of desperation in his effort to save Bohemia from further war. One of the immediate villains of the first game, a sneering Hungarian commander called Istvan Toth, gets plenty of time to plead his case to Henry in the sequel, too. Though he isn’t made overly sympathetic, he’s developed as a real character, the homophobia central to his depiction in Deliverance eased in the sequel, with the commander’s new romantic relationship made murky by a layer of paternal love represented more as a confusion of protection and sexual desire.

If the sequel functioned entirely as implicit apologia for what came before, it would be a fascinating cultural object, but one without a greater justification for its existence. The question of what it wants to model from the past, aside from a sprawling model of a bygone time and place, is answered by its constant return to scenes of pointless brutality. As Henry finds himself swept up in battle after battle, looting corpses, enduring torture and torturing in turn, journeying from village to village and witnessing the prejudices of one group of people or another, a murky portrait of the era coheres.

Deliverance II shows the population of its 15th-century Bohemia—and of the Holy Roman Empire and Europe as a whole—as people attempting to live in a system where kings manipulate the world to their advantage, the nobility moves in their monarch’s shadow to further their own interests, and the merchant and peasant classes thrive or suffer at the whims of those above them. There is beauty in its picturesque depictions of those who inhabit the countryside, working to till a patch of land or produce horseshoes for market. The game presents its stretch of Bohemia as a natural idyll, filled with sunshine and burbling brooks, rolling fields, and dense, almost impossibly green forests. But there is also a looming threat hanging over all of this, as Henry and the player travel from peaceful villages to scenes of destruction and misery left in the wake of warring rulers. If the first Deliverance was a game that celebrated the Czech lands with a narrow view of who truly belonged to the region, its sequel expands (or clarifies) this celebration as praise for the broader culture and natural character of its setting instead.

The destruction of this national essence comes, in Deliverance II, not from the dangers of a malevolent Other but from the absurdity of a war fought between two potential rulers who see Bohemia more as a source of revenue—especially, in many crucial plot points, its silver deposits—and political opportunity than a land worth protecting for its own sake. (Both Sigismund and Wenceslas are described as poor successors for their father, the late Charles IV/Charles I of Bohemia, who ruled during what’s considered the kingdom’s golden age.) This viewpoint is furthered by the player’s knowledge, emphasized by the presence of future Hussite military commander Jan Žižka as a major character, that not long after the events of the game, its era’s staid and oppressive order will be destabilized by the revolutionary thoughts and actions of the Hussites.

As successful as this is on a thematic level, though, it's all a bit too stiff to resound emotionally. Like the first game, Deliverance II plays out more as a picaresque than a grand drama, Henry bouncing between locations and scenes that illustrate the breadth of its setting and cast without accompanying depth. The game's climax arises quickly and the central characters feel only partially drawn by the time they arrive at it, the personalities of the cast fairly one note. As a result of its wide scope, general concentration on plot over characterization, and systems-heavy role-playing design, the narrative never feels completely organic. This is especially evident in a conclusion that grasps at a weighty comment on what a good life looks like in the midst of medieval turmoil. Here, with Henry finally coming to terms with the death of his parents and considering the potential shape of his future, Deliverance II shows that it's far better at reckoning with a long view of its setting's meaning than the characters who inhabit it.

Still, there's value to the way the game centres the prevailing horrors of kingdom-devastating upheaval. Looking for heroes and villains in long-gone historical eras—especially across the gulf of shifting cultural and moral contexts—is usually more trouble than it’s worth. This, Deliverance II seems to agree with, in moving from a restrictive, frequently ugly first outing to a far more nuanced sequel. Over and over, it suggests, the real enemy of its historical cast is an oppressive system whose disorder leads to widespread violence. In other words: A man trying to participate in society while dripping with blood is, in Deliverance II, less a symbol of valor than an affront to everyone who meets him.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter and on Bluesky.

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The Past, Covered with Blood