Manage an entire kingdom using only three buttons!
At its heart, Sort the Court! is a resource management title. You play as a king, and your job is to grow the kingdom and join the Council of Crowns. Managing the kingdom is done by simply answering 'yes' or 'no' questions asked by the various NPCs that enter your castle and trying to keep up the kingdom's three assets - population, happiness and gold. It's not quite as easy as it sounds, however.
Sure, some tasks (such as feeding your cat) are easy, but others can be a bit more challenging. You'll often be asked for resources you currently do not possess, and the consequences for not handling the situation can quickly snowball out of control. Sometimes your morals will be put to the test and you have to decide which is the lesser of two evils. Regardless of your decision there will be a trade off somewhere, reminding you of that old saying about pleasing people (as in you can't please everyone all the time).
Throughout it all, your decisions impact not only your success but future events as well. Helping your subjects typically pays off, but you may not reap the rewards until much later. That's not to say you won't see instant results of your decisions, because a majority of the lesser events provide those immediately. There's also a handful of straight up coin-flip questions, where choosing to accept the NPC's help results in either a positive or negative effect on the spot.
It seems that what NPCs show up and when is at least somewhat random. This means that you'll never really play the exact same game twice. I imagine the more important characters (such as those from the Council of Crowns) are set to appear after reaching certain milestones, though I'm not so sure about the extra storylines. Most of the NPCs have some connection to a few others, and your interactions between them can have interesting and often amusing results.
As for aesthetics, the game features a light-hearted art style with characters that look like they were drawn for a children's storybook, which fits the game perfectly. There's also a light music piece that surprisingly didn't grate on me even though it was on a loop, likely because it doesn't include the stereotypical blaring trumpets you might expect whenever you see a king.
It really feels like Sort the Court! was designed with the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) rule in full effect. Paring a concept as grand as managing a kingdom down to simple Y/N questions is pretty neat and I had a lot of fun giving this game a go!
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