The game is set in the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, an Imperial State of the Holy Roman Empire, with a focus on historically accurate content.

On the orders of Hungarian king Sigismund, half-brother of Wenceslaus, Cuman mercenaries raid the mining village of Skalitz, a major source of silver.

Destitute and vengeful, Henry joins the service of Lord Radzig Kobyla, who leads a resistance movement against Sigismund's invasion.

The game features branching quest lines, an open world environment, and period-accurate weapons, clothing, combat techniques, and architecture (recreated with the assistance of architects and historians), which encourages immersive gameplay.

It utilises a classless role-playing system, allowing the player to customise their skills to take on roles such as warrior, bard, thief, or a hybrid of these.

[1] For example, a heavily armored knight may on his upper body wear a gambeson, followed by mail and plate armour, with a tabard or surcoat over top, for a total of four clothing items in the chest slots.

[3] Horses are featured heavily in the game, and are designed to act with their own AI while under the player's control, moving or jumping to avoid small obstacles or dangers.

The player can also fight from horseback and use their steed to carry items if they need additional inventory space, but warhorses are also competent combatants with their own AI.

The game uses skill/stat-based mini-games for many of these tasks, including weapon and armor repair, as well as for gathering new items by picking locks or pockets, distilling alcohol, or creating medicines.

[1] Other real-world settlements and towns in the game include Ledečko, Mrchojedy, Přibyslavice, Samopše, Sázava Monastery, Stříbrná Skalice, Talmberk, Úžice, and Vraník.

[6][7] Before the events of the game, the Kingdom of Bohemia was ruled by Charles IV, who was also Holy Roman Emperor, and it experienced a golden age under his reign.

Other notable characters are the Hungarian nobleman and main antagonist Istvan Toth (Logan Hillier), the Leige Lord of Skalitz: Radzig Kobyla (Michael Pitthan), Henry's primary love interest the mill maid Theresa (Victoria Lynn Carroll), Henry's father Martin (Matthew Wolf), acting Lord of Rattay: Hanush of Leipa (Peter Hosking, Daniel Vávra), bandit gang leader Runt (Luke Allen-Gale), the noble Jobst of Moravia (Marc Cram), the German knight Markvart von Aulitz (Richard Zeman), and chief engineer of Skalitz: Tobias Feyfar (Ben Bradshaw).

Henry helps Radzig's and Divish's soldiers overwhelm the camp and kills Runt after a duel, but fails to locate his father's sword.

Tóth reveals that he wields Henry's father's sword and plans to use his mercenaries to conquer Bohemia, expecting Sigismund to reward him once he reigns as king.

However, Tóth and a number of his mercenaries infiltrate Talmberg and capture its castle, taking Divish's wife Stephanie and Sir Radzig as hostages.

The team was preparing to abandon the project when a successful pitch to a private investor, the Czech billionaire Zdeněk Bakala, secured funding to develop a prototype of the game.

[10] On 22 January 2014, Warhorse Studios launched a crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter with the goal of generating £300,000, ten percent of the US$5,000,000 budget, in order to prove to investors that there was an audience and desire for the game.

[12] The game's adaptive music soundtrack[13] was composed by Jan Valta and Adam Sporka,[14] and its parts were recorded with a symphonic orchestra in Rudolfinum.

[29][30][31] EGM criticised the game's difficult-to-use save system, long loading times, and frequency of software bugs, complaining that they had logged 30 hours of real-time play but that only 19 hours had actually been spent advancing the game because of this, concluding that "What could have been an intriguing, unique, if somewhat underwhelming RPG is completely crippled by a terrible save system and game-breaking bugs.

...however, the countless technical issues Kingdom Come requires you to suffer...until the developer brews up a comprehensive salve of patches and polish, you should avoid Henry's adventure like the plague.

"[35] Kat Bailey of USgamer thought that the game's commitment to "realism", including hunger and sleep meters and the restrictive save system, was "contrived" and got in the way of fun and immersion.

[41] Charlie Hall of Polygon similarly found the realism to be overplayed, complaining that despite plenty of people populating the world, only a small fraction were interactable.

[44] Outlets such as Kotaku noted that there seemed to be more glitches and software bugs on the Xbox version of the game, and that the update patches were solving less of the errors than they were on other platforms.

He felt that the game's idyllic version of Bohemia did not accurately reflect the "powder keg" of ideological tension that would soon break out into war just a few years later.

She noted that the protagonist Henry's social mobility from peasant to knight would have been so rare as to be anachronistic for the time period, but fits with the modern audience's expectations of a hero's journey.

[49] In contrast, no amount of evidence of non-White peoples in Bohemia would be deemed sufficient to gain acknowledgement in the product, as it could always be dismissed as "inaccurate, poorly researched, politically motivated or too specific".

A commentator at the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny called the accusations "out of place" and claimed that most Europeans would respond that there were very few, if any, black people in early 15th-century Bohemia.

[56] She criticised the game for inaccurately portraying the gender roles of the time and that the villainous depiction of Cumans was based on modern stereotypes, not historical sources.

[56] David Francis Wagner, of Heroine magazine, criticised both sides of the conflict—Hübnerová for her failure to play the game thoroughly, which led to some inaccurate statements, and Vávra for his inability to distinguish between biased and unbiased historical sources.

[58][59] Vávra shared his video response on his Facebook page, which resulted in abuse, harassment, and violent threats against Hübnerová, which academics compared to the behavior of members of GamerGate.