Roadwarden Review
Roadwarden
Platform: PC
Developer: Moral Anxiety Studios
Publisher: Assemble Entertainment
Release Date: Sept. 8, 2022
MSRP: Pending Release
Chances are, you already know whether or not you want to play Roadwarden just based on the screenshots alone. It belongs to a very unique family of games with its pixelated sepia visuals and deep text-based gameplay. With games like these, it’s important to meet them on their own terms— yes, they can be frustrating and complex, but the audience they’re aiming for appreciates that complexity, frustration, and density. It’s a game where the mechanics and the story are so intertwined that one requires learning the other, and rewards careful study of both. But that being said, does Roadwarden thrive on its own merits and work as the kind of game it strives to be?
Well, sort of.
Roadwarden casts you as the titular Warden, a kind of free-roaming agent of the Ten Cities sent to the Peninsula to patrol and keep lines of trade open with your homeland. You pick from three classes: a Fighter, a Mage, or a Scholar, something between a diplomat and an alchemist. Over the course of the game’s opening moments, you choose a class, a reason you decided to become a Roadwarden, and a religion. Then, you’re let loose into the map with the barest of direction, sent to interact with and clear up the wilderness as you wish. The more you visit towns and solve the inhabitants’ problems or reconnect the roads, the more people trust you and the more you can uncover secrets and alternate routes around the map. But be warned— you only have forty days to complete your mission and uncover the secrets of the Peninsula before you’re recalled to the Ten Cities for good, and before you know it, that time will be up.
The mechanics of Roadwarden are blissfully simple in practice— It’s all text, so you just click on the onscreen options, follow the prompts, and keep a close watch on your health, armor, hunger, and appearance. While the stats aren’t the meat of the game, they definitely help with things, as you can only perform certain actions as long as you’ve managed your health, hunger, and sometimes even appearance. The joy of playing Roadwarden, however, is the sheer amount of detail within those mechanics. As you click around and explore, the map fills in, giving you a larger picture of the area. Doing certain activities or answering questions changes your general stats, as the game tracks everything from lies you tell to how faithful you are to your specific religions.
It’s a wonderful exercise in minimalism overall. The writing is incredibly strong, with one scene in particular offering up terse, tense inputs for a village where everything is secretive, and the looping, ambient music cutting out or changing to the noises of insects or animals in the distance depending on the scene and how appropriate it is. It’s easy to be lulled by the music, only to be jarred suddenly by its absence or by the sudden sound of animals, and it works excellently with the minimalist interface. It also leaves large portions of the world up to the imagination, with such bizarre details as the prevalence of howler monkeys, gigantic birds, dinosaur riders, and even stranger things up to the reader.
The text also contributes to the density. Roadwarden is not a fast-paced game, nor is it a game that you can beeline through even if you know how to solve certain puzzles. In your quest to explore the Peninsula, you have to exhaust every dialogue option, figure out every relationship, and possibly even make deals with some unsavory characters to advance your own agenda. This also makes the time limit that much more important— you will not be able to do everything or solve every problem, so the ones you can solve count all that much more and it’s important to figure out what impact you’ll have. You’ll find yourself weighing decisions, roleplaying based on your strengths and weaknesses, and trying to figure out how best to use your abilities to fix up the fractured lands of the Peninsula.
But like many games of its type, progress can be frustratingly obtuse at times. The player has to know the right dialogue options to unlock abilities at each settlement, from trade to a place to sleep to other services, and will sometimes find themselves going through the same dialogue tree over and over again trying to find just the right sentence. There’s also a number of “guess the word” puzzles throughout. While some of these can be defeated by looking through your journal, there’s not really an easy way to organize that journal. If there was a way to sort beyond category, that would definitely be more helpful. Also, for a game that kind of showcases its replayability and ability to find multiple solutions to each problem, Roadwarden’s slow pace and dense thickets of words tend to slow it down and make replaying each scenario something of a slog.
The sum total of the experience is that Roadwarden is an excellent work for those seeking an old-school adventure full of textual density and a unique world, but is very much a specific work for a specific audience. While its gorgeous pixel art, sepia tones, and unusual world are willing to give up their delights with patience, it requires significant effort and exertion to get to that point. Worth it for some, certainly, but overall an experience meant for the most devoted.
The Good:
- Dense world
- Interesting spin on a text-adventure format
- Old-school nostalgia and charm
- Unusual fantasy world
- A delight to those who enjoy this kind of old-school experience
The Bad
- Very slow-paced to the point of becoming a slog at certain points
- Not very welcoming to newcomers
- The pace and density make the multiple playthroughs the game encourages somewhat difficult
Final Score: