Kings or Commons

August 1642. You are nobody in particular, on the street in Much Wenlock, and a paper has just gone up on the Guildhall saying the King has raised his standard against his Parliament at Nottingham.

Pick a name from the ones people actually had. Then pick a side, because everyone is about to have to. Take the King’s shilling from the serjeant at the market cross and go to Shrewsbury, where Charles is raising regiments and melting down college plate to pay them. Or go north with the carrier to Nantwich, where Sir William Brereton holds Cheshire for the Parliament and nobody will ask what your father was.

Both roads lead to Edgehill, and Marston Moor, and Naseby. After that they part for good: one ends with a crown, the other with Cromwell’s chair. Neither ending is clean.

It is a tile-by-tile first-person crawl - step, turn, look, act - through eight places in England as the wars pass over them. The Chronicle records the real history behind every scene you walk into, kept deliberately separate from the fiction, so you can always tell which is which. Where the Royalist road departs from what actually happened, at Naseby in June 1645, the game stops and tells you so.