I appreciate a good single-serving game idea, and The One Who Pulls Out The Sword Will Be Crowned King is one. Its challenge is simple: pull a sword out of a stone by left-click grabbing it and pulling your mouse upwards. Its catch is devious: with each new player crowned king, the sword gets longer and heavier. Do you have the perseverence to be royal? It’s free to find out.
Here’s a brief trailer, but basically this view is the entire game:
It is possible to play offline, in which case the sword will have a fixed length and weight, but the online mode is where real achievement lies. Pulling the sword out will alert everyone else playing that you have been crowned king and add your name to a list of the 100 most recent kings.
I just had a go, playing the game for 15 minutes, and I’d wager that the sword moved around 8 inches. From watching videos, that’s at most 10% of the distance it needs to travel to succeed in pulling it out. I made a few mistakes, moving my mouse so fast that my invisible hands seemingly slipped from the handle. There are also tricks I wasn’t employing which may make the process go faster, such as turning mouse sensitivity up to 900% in the game’s settings. Either way, it’s going to take considerable time.
If no one is able to pull the sword out for a while, it will apparently begin to shrink and get lighter, but a new king was being crowned every couple of minutes while I played. There are currently 426 people playing the game, so there’s a decent chance it’ll be even harder to remove the sword by tomorrow.
Is it worth putting in that time just to have your name on a high score table? I don’t know. Is it worth the much longer time it would take to master and overcome the mountains in Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy or Jump King?
You can play The One Who Pulls Out The Sword Will Be Crowned King via Steam, where the game is completely free.