Story & setting

Castile, and the war against the anti-monarchists

IRON NEST is set in an alternate Spain. You serve Castile — a monarchy whose every dispatch closes Glory to Castile — against forces the state only ever calls the anti-monarchists. The campaign is driven by a figure named only as the General, whose stated aim is the peaceful unification of the peninsula, and who is introduced to you through newspapers that praise him.

The game never lets you see the war directly. You read it in propaganda — the same dispatches that call a shelled ceremony proof of the enemy's barbarism, and a retaken city almost majority intact. Those clippings are collected on the dispatches page, and reading them in order is the closest the game comes to telling you what it thinks of your orders.

The campaign runs 1927 to 1928

Dates are the datelines printed on the in-game newspapers. All 14 maps sit on the Iberian peninsula, from the Bay of Cádiz to coastal Catalonia.

Where the gun came from — and who Anton is

The best-written thing in the game is a letter from a naval officer who never appears. His ship was a Kaiserliche Marine dreadnought transferred to Castile and renamed for the king. He declined to rename her turrets, on the grounds that renaming a ship is bad luck and he saw no reason to press their fortune further. So the turrets kept their German names, and the one in his sightline from the bridge was called Anton.

“Many years is a long time to share a horizon with something. … I was told the turrets were going to a new programme. I did not ask which one.”

That programme is the Iron Nest. The emplacement you operate is that ship's main armament, dug into Spanish hillsides — which is why the console has a Left Gun and a Right Gun rather than one barrel. Much later, after a costly breakout, a Vice Admiral signs off not to the Iron Nest but to Anton. The game has been telling you who you are the whole time.

One footnote for the pedantic: the letter names the king Alfonso XIII in one revision and Alonso XIII in another. Alfonso XIII was the real king of Spain across this period, so the former is likely intended — but the game ships both, and we would rather say so than pick one and call it canon.

How it ends

The campaign closes at Barcelona, which the Ministry frames as one final choice. There are 4 endings, each tracked as its own commendation, and the last order you are given before the credits is not about Barcelona at all — it is that tomorrow the march north across the Pyrenees begins.

We've left how each ending is reached off this page. If you want that, the medals page lists all 30 commendations including the ending ones — so treat that as the spoiler door.