Welcome to the Into Indie Games beginner guide for The King is Watching!
The King is Watching is a roguelite strategy game in which you must manage a castle and defend it against monster invasions – with the twist that your subjects only work when you gaze upon them. Developed by Hypnohead and published by tinyBuild, The King is Watching released on July 21, 2025 on PC.
For more information on The King is Watching beyond this guide, check out its Steam page here.
Table of contents
Increase your gaze size ASAP
In The King is Watching, your gaze determines which buildings are undergoing production. Buildings outside your gaze will be idle. This naturally means that the bigger your gaze size, the more buildings are producing things for you.
Your gaze size starts out with a measly 3 tiles, but over the course of a game, you can upgrade it one tile at a time, maxing out at a whopping 6 tiles – double your original gaze size.
You can find the gaze size upgrade button located just above the Morale indicator. Each gaze size upgrade has its own resource requirement, so make sure you collect those resources and upgrade your gaze size as soon as you can.
Unit buildings don’t need your gaze after production
In The King is Watching, producing units is critical to defending your castle, as your castle does not have any defenses of its own at the beginning of the game. You will need to build units such as peasants, longbowmen, hunters, swordsmen, mages, and so on, to protect your castle from all manner of evil entities.
Units are produced in special buildings, and each building will state the limit of units of that type that you can currently produce. Once you hit the maximum value of units for a building, you do not need to keep gazing at that building to keep your units active. You only need to gaze at it if the unit quantity drops below maximum and you need to produce more units.
Move buildings liberally
The tutorial for The King is Watching warns you that while you can move your buildings, they will suffer a brief production penalty after the move. While this is true, you should move your buildings for optimization anyway, as the production penalty is quite short in most cases.
You can move buildings by holding down Shift and dragging the building to its new location. In the event there already is a building at the new location, the two buildings will be swapped instead. Bear in mind both will suffer a move penalty though.
You can’t always predict future emergencies and situations, so your build set-up at one point may not be optimal later. The best solution, a lot of the time, is to simply move your existing building.
Regularly increase your unit limit
Your units are your first line of defense against enemies, and you will need as many units as you can muster if you mean to defeat enemy invasions. Much like your gaze size, unit limit is something you should look to increase as much as possible.
Your unit limit upgrade button can be found just above your gaze size upgrade button (which is in turn, just above your Morale indicator). Make sure you check its requirements regularly and upgrade it so that you can have more units defending your castle.
Thank you for reading the Into Indie Games guide for The King is Watching.
For more interesting articles about all things indie games, be sure to check out the links below.
- Into Indie Games Homepage
- Fretless – The Wrath of Riffson Review
- The Drifter Review
- Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream Walkthrough
- Everdeep Aurora Guide: What you need to know
