Kingdom Come 2 and Avowed have revealed to me the grand unified theory of game design: A good game is when you can steal back the money you just spent at a shop, a bad game is when you can’t

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is great. So great that I slapped a 90% score on it in our Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review. But frankly, I wasted a lot of your time in that piece, nattering on about narrative and mechanics and whatever when I could have just presented you with my grand unified theory of videogame design and left it there: A good game is when you can steal back all the money you just spent at a shop, a bad game is when you can’t.

QED, KCD2 is a good game. A great game, even. I spent approximately 40 hours in it exhaustively scamming every merchant on the map, turning myself into a literal renaissance man by paying skill-trainers for their time with the same 500 groschen over and over and over again.

Karl Marx, somewhere, breaks down capitalist exploitation of surplus value into M-C-M—money, commodity, money. A capitalist comes to the market with money, purchases labour power, and leaves with more money. The capitalist is a rube. If he had levelled his pickpocketing skill he could replace that commodified labour with literally anything—a trip to the bathhouse, a cake, multiple swords and a horse—and still walk away with his pockets jingling.

I genuinely love when games do this, not just because it’s incredibly satisfying, but because I take it as a key indicator that a games’ devs truly Get It. They know what it is about games, about immersive sim-style design, about spaces that live and breathe, that make them so much fun to be in and poke at. It’s a big stamp that suggests the devs like building moving worlds as much as I enjoy inhabiting them, and they’re not worried if the laws the game follows might let you get an unfair leg-up (or the opposite).

Rules are rules

Also, the rule just holds true. Baldur’s Gate 3? You can steal your gold back. KCD2? You can steal your gold back. Fallout: New Vegas? I defy you not to pickpocket every last cap from Major Knight at Mojave Outpost after he makes you once again pay through the nose to repair your crap.

I will, as a runner-up, accept games that don’t let you steal back the gold you spent but will let you just rob a store-owner of their entire stock directly. It’s less good—am I to believe my money has vanished into the ether, did I pay the shopkeep in this fantasy world with my debit card?—but, look, it still suggests a dev team that’s more concerned with constructing a space that feels real and malleable, even if it might be to the detriment of game balance.

No one’s taste is wrong unless they dislike Alpha Protocol, but I’ve always preferred games that feel more like worlds than fairground rides, that feel like they proceed independently of me and according to their own rules rather than making me the protagonist of the universe, god’s own special boy. It doesn’t just mean ‘hardcore,’ or totally obliterating you if you wander into the wrong area, it means letting you bend the rules to your will if you’re smart or ambitious enough.

And it feels, dare I hope, like it’s a philosophy that’s becoming a bit fashionable these days, between bigger, splashier stuff like KCD2 and smaller games like Peripeteia. I feel like we might be heading into the decade of the (light) immersive sim, and I couldn’t be happier. As someone currently playing Avowed I would love, love to see it adopted in some hypothetical sequel.

I am, actually, really enjoying the game. It feels well-tuned and tightly designed, but that only takes me, a systems-loving sicko, so far. I agree with PCG’s Robin Valentine that the way it lets you take everyone’s stuff without complaint or impediment makes its world feel, well, like less of a world. After all, a crucial addendum to my grand unified theory of videogame design is that stealing your money back, or stealing anything, ought to risk some kind of consequence. It’s no good letting me steal from the shopkeeper if the shopkeeper couldn’t care less about it. That’s not a living, breathing space with exploitable rules, it’s a dollhouse.

But if the recent trend for imsim-adjacent design made Obsidian feel confident to branch out into something more clockwork, more systems-driven in Avowed 2: This Time In Ixamitl? We’re in GOTY territory, baby. That goes for nearly all games, frankly. There’s nothing that can’t be enhanced by letting me rob the shopkeeper. The rule holds true for everyone.