Really fun non-linear text based game. The writing is good and the pixel art is delicious.

What got me the most about this game is how it actually captures the feeling of being a fresh adventurer slowly growing comfortable with the lands so well. Starting out, all choices were nail-bitingly tense and everything felt dangerous. Could I afford to sleep here? Do I sell my healing potion to afford food, or is it better to go hungry? But as time progressed and you get more familiar with the land, more allies to work with, and more avenues of resources, you actually feel much more in control. The game goes seemlessly from "trying to survive" to "mastering these lands" .

I really wanted to like this game. It seemed like it would be right up my alley. But after getting about 3 hours in, it started to feel like it was nothing but an endless interlinked series of fetch quests, none of which I could do because I was too broke and too low on stats. I looked up some advice for beginners and this was only confirmed. “Try going to X, get a Y, do that for a few in-game days, and hopefully you don’t get ambushed on the road, good luck!” Either that or, “Just try to do a quest that you know you can do right now, and see where it leads you.” Another 3 hours later, I’ve been running around the whole map for days, my in-game time limit is halfway up, and I’m no closer to even being able to START most of the quests.

All this is to say, I can see why people love this game so much, but it did everything in its power to bore and frustrate me. I did appreciate some of its aspects though, such as how merchants will often outright refuse to buy anything from you if they don't need any of it. Makes the world feel more believable.

Narrative: 5
Gameplay: 4.5
Graphics: 4.5
X-Factor: 5
Overall: 5

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for July 2023, and this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before August 1st, 2023, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

A choose-your-own-adventure game.

Roadwarden feels like a classic choose-your-own-adventure book, where you’re just making choices, however, there’s a lot more. Your character has stats, that can potentially affect which scenes you see and how characters will act to you. The world is vastly hostile as well, meaning players will have to keep their wits about them. At least that’s the assumption.

I haven’t seen much of that yet, what I’ve played is pretty straightforward. It’s a very passive game as well, where the player is mostly just reading paragraph after paragraph and making choices. I don’t know how impactful those choices are yet. Also, the music can be quite repetitive, and I almost feel like I need a pen and paper to take notes, even though the game offers a journal for the main quests.

Pick this up if you love slow methodical stories, and exploring a dangerous wilderness. I enjoyed the reading but it was pretty terrible streaming because it’s just reading page of information after page. After playing it, I respect the game, but I just don’t see myself returning to this one due to how passive the experience was.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/Sx8Q4qAQKiU

Very solid game, with a few caveats. After having completed Roadwarden on its middle "standard" difficulty, I'd highly recommend playing on easy/casual. Standard doesn't change much except add a 40 day time limit to your game, something I personally hated.

Easy recommend if you're okay with reading a lot. Pixel art is gorgeous and goes great with the presentation, soundtrack is great though the limited track selection did start to grate towards the end of my playthrough. Very interesting world built entirely through dialogue in a way that feels natural.

Really my only complaint is the time limit. It sucks, and I ran into it hard at the end of my playthrough, rushing through the last couple quests I wanted to complete and running out of time anyway. Time pressure in the game is otherwise almost non-existent and the time limit feels tacked on to add some kind of urgency to a game that is otherwise pretty relaxed. This feels strongly like a game that wants you to take your time and really dig into it, and the time limit feels so completely at odds with the rest of the game that I have to wonder why it was included. It genuinely feels like it ruined my playthrough and retroactively soured a lot of my time with the game, and if I'd had the option to turn it off in the final stretch I would have done so without a second thought.

Despite this really long rant about what a pain the time limit is, I strongly recommend Roadwarden. Despite selling itself as a dark fantasy game it neatly dodges many of dark fantasy's pitfalls, presenting a world that, while harsh and unforgiving, has bright spots of humanity that are a real joy to explore and interact with.

Con una melodía cautivadora y misteriosa Roadwarden nos da paso a su mundo. Una península ambientada en fantasía oscura medieval, en la que pasaremos los siguientes 40 días. Pero no es su mundo lo que hace peculiar a este título, si no su forma de narrarlo. Con el apoyo visual de un bonito pixel art de la zona donde nos encontramos, todo lo que ocurre en el juego se cuenta a través de texto. Tiene un enfoque digno de novela, con extensas descripciones, pero aprovechando la interactividad que le brinda el medio. Ese enfoque me gusta, me parece una experiencia bastante única dentro del medio, aunque a veces pueda hacerse algo denso.

Tras una introducción en la que defines la clase de tu personaje y su motivación, Roadwarden te da un objetivo principal abstracto: explora su península en 40 días. Con esa idea en mente, te lanzas a descubrir lo que tiene la península para ti. Una península que realmente me ha parecido muy disfrutable de explorar y descubrir los secretos que guarda. Los pueblos y la gente que lo forma son interesantes, constantemente buscaba saber más, mejorar mis relaciones con ellos o ayudarles en diferentes tareas. Consigue muy bien transmitir la sensación de ser un roadwarden como ellos lo definen, un oficio que busca hacer los caminos más seguros y las relaciones entre pueblos más fructíferas. Todo influenciado por tus decisiones. No vas a poder tener a todos los personajes ni pueblos contentos, te tocará decidir de qué lado estás. Y esas decisiones tienen consecuencias, muy bien representadas en su final. Lo único que me ha desagradado de su apartado narrativo es lo densa que me resultaba a ratos su narración. Quizá porque intenta tratar todo con demasiado detalle innecesario, alargando mucho determinadas situaciones hasta el punto de saltarme partes de texto por aburrimiento.

Su apartado RPG y de gestión de recursos me gusta. Aunque he echado de menos que hubiera espacio para más rol, que tu clase importara un poco más en la historia y que pudieras definir más tus respuestas. Más compromiso por el RPG clásico. Por otro lado, hay una mecánica de su sistema de gestión de recursos que me genera debate, y son los 40 días que tienes para explorar. La totalidad de tus recursos como personaje (vida, armadura, apariencia, hambre y dinero) tienen como denominador común el tiempo. Todos se pueden conseguir gastando dicho tiempo, convirtiéndose en la divisa principal del juego. Le da significado a cada una de tus acciones, ya que no quieres quedarte sin tiempo para explorar, pero tienes que gestionar cada uno de tus atributos. Sin él las decisiones en roadwarden perderían sentido, siendo un punto fuerte del título. Sin embargo, llegar al final sin poder descubrir todo lo que te ofrece te deja un regusto amargo. Tras una larga reflexión, creo que esta mecánica es una representación de la vida en sí misma. El tiempo nunca se detiene y tenemos que tomar decisiones porque en algún momento se acabará para nosotros. No siempre podremos hacer todo lo que queramos antes de que se acaben nuestros días.

En definitiva, roadwarden me ha parecido una experiencia chula y peculiar. Su mundo me ha parecido interesante de descubrir, aunque en algunas partes me haya costado seguir por su forma de narración. Sin duda con una de las cosas que me voy a quedar es con su ambientación, lograda con una banda sonora impecable.

Well written world, charming art, good mechanics, and a story whose end you influence over time through both small personal and large social decisions.

Roadwarden is a text based RPG that has your character arriving in a northern peninsula to take on the role as the areas new Roadwarden and for more personal and secret tasks. The area you arrive in is broken up between a few different settlements of various prosperity surrounded by dangerous forests, bandits, creatures, and the reanimated dead from the bodies that were not burned after death. It is a Roadwarden's job to protect travelers, keep communication active between nearby towns, maintain paths and roads important to travel, and to fight or scare off monsters that endangers people. Upon arriving at a small outpost that is the areas closest point back to the city and civilization you come from you meet the only two surviving guards from a former party of eight, you learn that no one knows what happened to the last Roadwarden and asking about them both leads you to find that not to many people were fond of them and some are clearly not telling you all that they know.

Your choices in the coming conversations put you into a class of either a fighter who is better at combat and whose physical abilities, training, and knowledge of some enemies can allow you to activate an innate power in certain events that will give you a better option or to point out which existing options would be poor choices. A magic user that has a certain amount of spellpower to spend each day to help them through events. Or a Scholar that can read and decipher symbols, craft items to better survive or save time traversing the roads and forest, craft weapons, and brew potions. You can also choose the kind of religion that your character follows that can give you choices or effect your knowledge in certain situations and choose a personal goal for yourself like becoming rich, helping people, finding a place to live, escaping your past, etc. Your hidden job that you are shortly told is that you were paid by the merchants guild in the city to prepare that area for them to start traveling through, trading, and establishing outposts in the region. To do that you are expected to gain the trusts of town leaders and see that they are open to agreements with the merchants, help them in ways that will strength them that can be used by the merchants, and make sure there is nothing going on that would require them to send in soldiers or church inquisitors to war against the villages or to deal with problems you let get out of control. You are given 40 days, on the normal difficulty mode, to attempt to complete as much of your employer's goals, your own personal goal, and to do as much as you can to try to get the best ending for as many people as you can if that's what you desire.

Apar from the well written descriptions, characters, and encounters, some of your choices that would just be filler in most game can come back as having an influence on the world when what you tell people, maybe unless you chose an option with (lie) as part of the text, does show itself to be true either during the course of the game or in the ending scenes of the game when you go back to the city. Choices of how you act in dreams or what your character things of themselves, their future, and their current role can lead to multiple endings for your character depending on what your personal goal was and if you fulfilled it or not. How you solve problems, or if you discover them at all, will also influence the endings for the character you meet and the future of the towns in the coming years depending on if you have gained their trust, how their culture or leaders get along with merchants, if you left them with a dangerous leader, if you helped to set certain towns up with ways to better deal with the merchants, etc.

Your ways of interacting with people or encounters go beyond just the choices you make. People will respond better or worse based on the choice of greeting you give them (friendly, playful, stoic, intimidating, or insecure) and based on the condition of your outfit, how clean or dirty you are, and if you are wounded. Having a more favorable response can help people to trust you faster or allow you a better chance if you attempt to haggle for a jobs pay. Your choice of class, your vitality level, nourishment level, and the status of your armor will also effect how well you do in combat.

Good art style and music. Nice simple interface. You have a helpful journal that details your quests and some of what you have discovered about different subjects you are investigating, a section for details on people, details on towns, and a bestiary that describes different monsters and their potential weaknesses. A forgiving and not constantly oppressive feeling time limit, no stupid time progression from saying a few words or entering and exiting a building you accidentally clicked on.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1665575745253416962

God what a mood. The only reason this isnt 5 stars is because I'll be honest, if Im reading this much Id rather be reading a novel haha. This isnt tk say Roadwarden is poorely written as what it achieves is great, and the music and atmosphere are sublime. However, at a certain point a visual novel with this degree of RPG type choices will lose its focus a bit. I grew a little bored near the end, but I will be revisiting it as a staunch militaristic religious type in the future because the worldbuilding is remarkably open and locks you off from a ton due to its time constraint and choices you make. My choices were, of course, to be a hippie dippie pagan lol

Un'idea interessante ma sfortunatamente non riuscivo a rinteressarmi alla storia dopo aver preso una pausa d'alcuni giorni. M'intristisce perché godevo del gioco mentre giocarci, la scrittura è davvero piacevole e ben fatto -- un traguardo da non trascurare dato che il gioco tratta principalmente di lettura. Sono sicuro di esser in grado di completarlo ma oramai m'è passata la voglia. Raccomando ci provate se v'interessa scoprir un mondo da qualche parte tra quello di Game of Thrones e i Signori Degli Anelli.

Excellent presentation, engaging prose, reads/plays smoothly. I think it handles it's non-linearity well, and more than sticks the landing. The text input stuff can be a bit obtuse, but I never felt like it truly hindered me. The limited time pressure of normal mode added a good weight of challenge. Even playing a second time on story didn't feel too breezy, I still had work to do in order to solve all the mysteries and do all the things I wanted. In the end all I needed was 10 more days; Which felt good to me.

Seems like few things are this normal about gender... 4 stars.