It’s hard — nay, impossible — to imagine a world in which a bunch of brave game developers sit in a room and pitch a big-budget, high-end video game about life in 16th century Bohemia. It’s harder yet to imagine that same pitch talking about cooking, blacksmithing, laundry, manual labour, and personal hygiene, only for the money people to say ‘take my coin’ at the very prospect. They’re not exactly back-of-the-box, bums-in-seats ideas.

All this, too, without a dragon, wizard or magic spell in sight.

And yet to describe Kingdom Come is in part to describe its spiritual progenitors Skyrim and Morrowind — the ones that do have wizards and dragons. It’s a first-person sword-swinging, bow-shooting action RPG in an expansive open world whose denizens go about their daily business and ask you to complete quests that usually involve conversation, killing, or collecting. There’s perks, skill points, gear, and many of the usual, flatpack western RPG mechanics.

It has that early ’00s PC RPG feel to it. An era of wonder, of not quite knowing what lay beyond the screen you could see at that moment. Open worlds didn’t feel so rote then — the rules weren’t so established. Here, developer Warhorse captures that same sense of awe its predecessors had without the wonderments of high fantasy, or any fantasy at all. They’ve taken the mundane and made it feel magical without a single spell being cast.

So we live in that world where Warhorse successfully made that pitch. And its sequel makes me oh so glad that we do.

But I wasn’t so glad at first. Not for the first ten hours or so.

That’s because you’re dropped into a hefty map replete with caves, villages, and camps with nary a pair of undies to your name, expected to make your way in a world where everything’s out to get you. As such, you might — like I did — run in every which direction trying to poke a hole in the armour this world is seemingly covered in. A world in which the threat of death or destitution lies in every direction, a single-player medieval battle royale.

Thankfully, the frustration and desperation of its opening hours is slowly eroded by fumble-and-find-out progress, such as learning a trade or stuffing your wallet by hunting down bandits and selling the spoils afterwards. It’s a satisfying arc that washes away the bitter taste of its early hours. You might even look back on that troubled, impoverished time with a kind of warped affection, as if you can’t appreciate where you are with having come from something worse.

And once you’ve established a foothold — when you have chainmail on your chest, a sword on your side, and some coin in your pocket — you’re able to pierce the world’s protective layer. It’s an ah I get it moment. That was my first bandit kill, which felt like delicious revenge on a place that had oppressed me for half a dozen hours. It was an truly an indescribable thrill.

The world pushed me, and I was finally able to push back.

And boy, does it like to push. If you’re not fending off the wants of sleep and hunger, you’re fighting a wolf pack or bandits or tricksters, or the greatest foe of all: lack of coin. Kingdom Come 2’s character upgrades gradually ease those burdens, such as resistance to hunger and the strength to carry more gear. They sound aggressively mundane, but Kingdom makes these garden-variety perks feel positively transformative because even the mildest advantage moves the needle in a world that’s so unforgiving.

And that strife imbues the experience with an meditative quality. To earn a place in this world, you need to be aware, be present, and be mindful about everything you do, lest you want to lose that everything to some careless error. You can’t unlock the ability to auto-craft healing potions, nor can you palm these tasks off to some digital gofer. You’re never truly beneath needing to put your axe to grindstone, quite literally.

That meditative quality is also derived from simply being in the world. The ambience of a burning torch at midnight or the pouring rain in a tent next to a lake. The sun breaking over a marketplace in the middle of a dense cityscape. The denizens who harass you to talk religion or throw you in the rathaus for that spoonful of soup you nicked in the nascent hours of your journey. It’s an almost untellable sense of place and agency. In-game chores are massaged by this ambience, such as the crackle of a fire when brewing potions or the chatter of people walking by while you’re hammering out an axe to sell later.

That agency can result in a game with the highest of highs, where you massacre a squad of heavily armed bandits or pull an absolute blinder of a heist — to the lowest of lows, as you steal spoonfuls of stew from the local tavvy because you’ve not a penny nor a pan lid to your name. Warhorse bucks genre trends, or perhaps BioWare and Bethesda trends, of your being special, deserved, or pre-destined. You’re a mere man stuck squarely in the miserable, fleshy domain of humanity.

With that comes toil and dismay. It’s a world where everything is slowly earned and quickly lost, where the difference between life and death, between success and failure, is the swing of a sword or the utterance of a word. Warhorse understands that the slow stuff such as grinding herbs and forging horse shoes isn’t all that fun — it’s not exactly worthy of an E3 reveal. They also understand that having made your own potions and having forged your own sword is a reward unto itself, and they impart just enough burden to help you feel like you’ve earned it.

It’s all these things that make you feel part of the world, and not a player in it. You become stronger — the strongest, perhaps. But you’re still a human being who’s a piece of metal away from death and lost progress. That weakness migrates into the story, turning something as benign as pouring a glass of wine into a nail-biting endeavour.

And just about everything else can become an endeavour. A wayward sword slash might just hurt you, or it might cause a bleed that’ll slowly kill you without the proper treatment. You travel to a nearby village to recuperate, only to be intercepted by bandits on the way — totally changing the course of your in-game day. Nothing is without consequence. It means fun isn’t always at the fore, as gratification is often delayed. But rarely, if ever, omitted.

Rightly so, a game that puts you in the world should rightly evoke all the emotions being in said world entails: anger, disappointment, frustration — usually at my past self’s dodgy decision making — fear, joy, elation, calm. And deciding whether or not to dive into 16th century Bohemia likely comes down to whether you want trade those immediate rewards, or what you might call fun, for immersion, for that emotional return on investment that might take literal hours to recoup.

That’s why I’d implore newcomers to persevere through Kingdom Come 2’s opening barrage — because those negative emotions tend to be front loaded. It takes time to earn your place in that world. It can be both intimidating and intoxicating, and you have to push through the former to get to the latter. Warhorse’s latest feels like a reset in many ways, then — the video-game equivalent of a so-called dopamine fast. Whereas dispatching a single baddie or any other action in virtually any other game might be done as casually as popping to the corner shop, Kingdom Come transforms it into a conscious and deliberate act.

To describe Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 as a simulation — which some people have — does it an injustice. It implies a cold, calculated, by-the-numbers take on a historical setting that you’d only attempt if you loved it so. No, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a fawning re-enactment in digital form for which we’ve been given the privilege of playing the starring role. From its acting and its artistry to its script and its sound, it’s so far an incredible experience that might very well make it into the history books as one of the most successful and immersive role-playing games ever made.

Fortune, it seems, really does favour the brave.