There's definitely an issue with the skills needed at anyone stage to survive being kind of random, but it's somewhat alleviated by the idea that the game is designed to be save scummed. The idea is supposed to be that you get to a point, die, load a save a few weeks back and try to figure out how you can raise that skill in time to make the required check without failing the others on your way.
I totally agree that it's not as satisfying as it should be, but I did find that games like this are interesting in that the narrative is spread over all the choices instead of a single playthrough. You learn about her perilous situation by seeing all the ways it could have gone. In that sense winning on your first time must have really spoiled the affair because you never dipped down an alternate side path or saw how one conversation could topple her throne.
But even for me the execution wasn't good enough to fully explore all the different paths you can take. I still don't know the true reasons for Eldoie's mother's death.
I do agree that the game sometimes appears plain unfair, but I don't think it's actually random nor does it feel random. The difficulty setting is consequently set to Real Life and because of that Save Scumming is entirely encouraged (you get a second choice etc). I managed the game on my second try and about every 8th try after that by trying out all sorts of nonsense to see what happens. I see it in the way that the game is actually a "Groundhog Day" Loop and the players use their time powers (save and reload) to make sure the princess is nudged in the right direction and survives, preferably with not that many losses. Naturally, one can also be a total jackass and turn Elodie into a psychotic jerk who executes people left and right just for looking funny at her, but that's entirely up to the player. My favourite Elodie for example was a very wise and fair queen who made her homeland into a technological icon of progress while holding magic to the royal family exclusively yet who's also not above imprisoning and even executing traitors.
Overall, I don't think the game is lacking. It offers plenty choices in a cutthroat environment to range from death by idiocy to death by miscalculation to well-deserved revolution and also survival by being totally clueless or wholesome or incredibly cruel. Or possible combinations thereof.
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Long Live the Queen fails to live up to its promise
Long Live The Queen is a quirky sort of game lying somewhere in-between a simulation, a visual novel, and a choose your own adventure game. You are Elodie, the 14-year old heir to the throne. Your mother, the queen, has died, and you must prepare yourself to take the throne in 40 weeks – if you can survive that long. The game takes its name from the fact that this is no easy task; death can lurk anywhere. Or so the trailers promise, at any rate.
The trailers seemed to indicate that this game was primarily humorous in nature; you create Elodie after Elodie, training her differently each time, only for her to meet some unfortunate end along the way. While the unfortunate end bit may or may not be accurate, the humor is not; while there are a few humorous moments in the game, on the whole the story is actually quite serious, and follows Elodie as she tries to navigate the complexities of court life while being woefully underprepared for it. Frequently, Elodie is faced with some sort of situation that she has to deal with, and via a combination of her skills – which she trains herself in two of every week, at your direction – and your own decisions, you must navigate your way through the game blindly, never knowing what the consequences of your decisions are going to be in the end. Everything from deciding whether or not to attend a birthday party to choosing to assassinate a scheming noble is covered by the game, and which skills you have seem to affect the choices you can make. As you go through the game, your choices have consequences which come back on you, forcing you to deal with or benefit from your past decisions.
The problem is that the game lacks any feeling of agency; your choices are rewarded or punished seemingly at random, and it is never clear which skills are useful and which are useless, whether any given skill is going to be useful in the immediate future, what the consequences of many of your choices will be, or even how high a skill needs to be to succeed at a task. Thus, on the whole, the game feels very random. I actually won on my first attempt, something the trailers implied was insanely difficult, despite the game not telling me anything about what I should be doing. It felt wholly unearned.
On the whole, the game is lacking. It has a good premise, but the execution is poor.