The My Lovely series has always been a bit of an oddball, delivering strategy sim play that has typically mixed with an emotional component as well. Starting with a daughter, then moving on to a wife, this time around you’ll find yourself in command of an Ancient Asian empire, trying to keep things together in the aftermath of the loss of your mother as well as your aforementioned Empress.

That has put you in a pretty horrible position, losing your support, help, and guidance and trying to manage an unceasing flow of problems bubbling up across your empire. Worse, it turns out that being in charge is no simple matter, with multiple factions all vying for your attention and favor, and each of them threatening to give you trouble of some kind if you fail to keep them somehow in balance. Be warned, if you manage to tick off the wrong people too much or too often, you may have to be concerned for your life, so you’ll need to carefully keep an eye on all of your key advisors and try your best to manage the common areas of concern among your people.

This results in a game that will have you typically second guessing yourself with some regularity, trying to figure out the best tasks to tackle that benefit the most critical people, and even working with a variety of spirits in order to effectively enact your agenda. Your biggest hurdle to success will unfortunately be that you’ll only be able to tackle so many issues, so inevitably some groups are going to start to get peeved with you, and you’ll then have to work out whether you should try to patch things up with them, or simply try to keep them just above the level where they’ll come after you. While the romantic element of things doesn’t feel all that developed as you’ll either look to woo someone from another kingdom, or perhaps try to resurrect your deceased empress, it all at least feels pretty unique as you try to play through.

Much like its predecessors, that leaves you with an odd mix of different concepts, but it does have just enough style to have some hope of pulling it off with the right crowd. Getting started and understanding what it will take to find real success is always the challenge, but if you have a taste for the somewhat dramatic and the concept sounds intriguing, it may well be worth picking up.