As GOG’s 2023 Autumn Sale continues to roll along, another game has gone up on the giveaway block. This time around it’s King’s Bounty: The Legend, a fantasy RPG-tactics game set in “a fantasy world of fearless knights, evil mages, wise kings and beautiful princesses.” And also frogs.
King’s Bounty: The Legend is very much the sort of thing GOG specializes in. It’s old (it first came out in 2008), obscure (developed by Russian studio Katauri Interactive, which for the record is still around), based on a series that’s positively ancient (the original King’s Bounty was published by the late, great New World Computing in 1990), occasionally weird (more on that later), and above all else, pretty good: It’s got a 4.4/5 overall rating on GOG, and a 79% aggregate score on Metacritic that includes an 88% review published in issue 195 of PC Gamer UK magazine.
The “weird” part I mentioned was summed up a few years back by Australian editor Jody Macgregor, who paid tribute to the game’s dedication to the broader implications of marriage in a magical fantasy setting. Players can opt to marry an elf or a dwarf—typical fantasy fare—or can opt instead to roll into more exotic territory by engaging in nuptials with a demon, a pirate, a zombie, or even a frog, which through the machinations of a whole bizarre quest involving a demented earl and an entire community of talking amphibians is who Jody decided would be his ideal life partner.
“I ended up married to a shapeshifting frog who kept referring to our children as ‘tadpoles’,” he wrote. “The internet tells me I should have married the demon instead because she can carry two weapons instead of just one. The internet has its own priorities.”
Indeed it does, and one of those priorities is often “free games,” which is what King’s Bounty: The Legend is for the next three days. You’ve got until September 4 to make it yours, while GOG’s Autumn Sale runs for another week beyond that, to September 11.