The Unwritten Kingdom

The Unwritten Kingdom is a game you can play or watch.

You play Rex, a bookbinder in a kingdom that runs on the written word, where the ink is fading. Letters, maps, and laws are going blank, including his town’s charter, and without a charter the town can’t build anything. Rex can bind a new one if he can find the materials. Finding them takes him out into the wilds, where something is drinking the kingdom’s ink.

Meanwhile, his towns are full of people living their own lives. Each one has a name, a home, a job, and a daily routine, and they make friends, fall out, fall in love, marry, and raise children whether or not Rex is around. You can follow the story, get sidetracked by the towns, or put the controller down and watch.

Play it in your browser → It’s free, with no account, and your saves stay in your browser.

The title screen: “The Unwritten Kingdom, a tale of Rex the Bookbinder” over a town square, with Rex in his oxblood coat standing on the cobbles and a copyright line along the foot.

Playing it

The kingdom is four counties, each with a town in trouble. Brindlewick’s words are fading. Rimeholm is frozen and silent, Cinderford’s Great Archive is smouldering, and Mudhollow is sinking into the swamp while bookworms eat its books. Rex heads out screen by screen through meadows, snowfields, lava fields, and bogs, fighting off monsters with his bone folder and gathering what each county’s charters need: ink from mushrooms, paper from bushes, thread from flax, and rarer things further out.

Each county has a boss behind the trouble, and each boss has a trick you have to work out: an ink blot that leaps and slams, a snow owl that eats every sound, a drake whose scales turn every blow until it charges into a wall, and a queen of the bookworms. Beneath the lakes lies the Unwritten, an underworld where every lost word drains, with a town of lost words of its own and more seals to break.

Rex in the Cinder Drake’s lair, a stone floor ringed with lava, his bone folder out as the drake charges at him.

Back in town, Rex binds what he’s found into a charter at his bench and takes it to the mayor. Each charter opens the next part of the story and lets the town grow, and you choose what gets built and where. Placement matters, because people care about their neighbours: a family likes living next to a garden or a school, and not next to a noisy tavern.

Rex also keeps a shop in every town. He makes notebooks, journals, and other wares at his bench, in plain, cloth, leather, clasped, or gilt bindings, and sets them out on his shelves. Townsfolk come in and buy what suits them. The happier a town is, and the more its people read, the more they buy.

Rex’s bench: a list of wares down the left (a flax notebook, a bookmark, a Name Book, a framed print, a paper garland) and, for the notebook, what it takes, how long it takes, and what it sells for.

Watching it

Five towns run on their own clock, a day every ten minutes of play. People go to work and school, run errands, visit friends, and head out in the evening. Each has two personality traits and a mood that comes from their home, their neighbours, their friends, and their town. Unhappy people sulk and eventually move away. Couples ask Rex to bind their marriage licence, and later a Name Book for a baby. Children grow up. Rex can court anyone he’s become good friends with, marry, and start a family of his own.

The towns have plenty going on. There are market days with haggling and a busker on the square, and children’s games after school. Every town has its own bar and can build its own stage. A night at Brindlewick’s Tavern might bring a sing-song, arm-wrestling, a storyteller, or a round bought for a birthday or a new baby. Each town also has a festival every four weeks, and once the right building is up, one special evening of its own every week: a reading circle at Brindlewick’s library, stargazing at Rimeholm’s observatory, anvil night at Cinderford’s forge, lantern-punt races in Mudhollow, and echo night at the well in the town of lost words.

A Tavern night in Brindlewick: townsfolk gathered on the rug with mugs raised while someone calls out, “A round on me! To wet the baby’s head! Little Posy!”

Watch mode leaves Rex where he is (in a tent by the fire, if he’s out in the wilds) and lets the camera roam any town he’s been to. You can follow anyone through their day, jump to whatever’s happening, or let the camera find someone who’s up to something. You can also speed time up, and if you like, let the towns grow on their own: once Rex has finished a town’s part of the story, its clerk writes charters from what the town has gathered, and the town chooses what to build.

Watch mode during Brindlewick’s Harvest Fair after dark: bunting and lanterns over the square, the crowd gathered round the pies, and the mayor announcing the winner.

Generations

Rex doesn’t stay young. After a few months in the game he goes grey and slows down, and when you’re ready, he writes his memoir at the bench and hands the workshops over to one of his grown children (or a child he’s adopted, or a close friend). The new Rex carries on the story where the old one left it. Old Rex retires to a house in town, where you can drop in for a cup of tea. The townsfolk grow old too, and retire to the seaside, and new families move into their homes.

Where it runs

The Unwritten Kingdom plays in the browser on a computer, with a keyboard, a mouse in the menus, or a gamepad, and on a phone held sideways, with touch controls. It saves when Rex sleeps in one of his workshop beds, and you can export a save to keep or move it to another browser.

The game on a phone held sideways: a d-pad on the left, an action button and the bone folder on the right, and Brindlewick’s square on market day in between, with a busker singing.

It’s a hard game. The bosses take a few tries, and some of the roads between towns are dark, tangled, and full of monsters, with nothing on the screen to point the way.

Playing it

Watching it

Generations

Where it runs

Log

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