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.

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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.

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" .

Soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal - haunting, mysterious, and atmospheric. It's what kept me coming back as much as I did. Luckily, it's on bandcamp to listen to and support the artist there.

The game's prose flows quite well and doesn't fall into the traps of being overly purple or too vague, striking a good medium that feels natural to read. While I do think the game is well-written, the actual pacing and traversal through the world of Roadwarden is incredibly frustrating and unrewarding, as the game's philosophy seems to be centered around the idea of "nope, you can't do that." It felt like playing a DnD adventure with the worst DM of all time:

>You come across a group and need to ask them questions about your quest.
>Ok I ask them questions
>No. They don't trust you, so they won't tell you. You're too dirty and nasty from traveling.
>Ok is there any way to wash up here?
>No. Also they will never change their minds about this even if you get cleaner later, so you fail.

>You come across a clearing with a tree and dead body.
>I inspect the tree.
>Cool. You discover it's a treant and it attacks you.
>I attack back.
>No. You die.
>Ok, I reload. I try to check the body this time.
>No. The treant attacks you and you die.
>Ok, I reload and try to deal with the treant a different way this time.
>No. I don't accept any of the options you type in. You die again.
>Ok, I reload and just leave this entire area and don't interact with the content because that's a fun way to play a game.

>Ok I found a new settlement and I will specifically make sure to NOT talk to them about the entire point of me coming here until I am clean, except there's no way for me to do that here, so I will leave and come back.
>Ok. You can do that.
>Ok I wash up and get completely ready - I repair my clothes and even buy a better set of clothing.
>No. While you are traveling you fall into a stream and tear your clothes on brush and are back at square one. By the way it's now nightfall and you can't travel at night so you have to waste another day, and you only have 40 to begin with.
>Fuck....you.

Making a text adventure that deters you from actually adventuring makes absolutely no sense. The world is tough and grueling, but that can be (and is) shown through descriptions, characters, and narrative direction - players shouldn't be constantly thwarted from interacting with a game's content. If 80% of the time, the safest option is to just walk away, then that's what I will do for 80% of Roadwarden and just purchase the OST on bandcamp.

no doubt in my mind: roadwarden will be the 2022 sleeper hit for some time to come. a powerful reminder of not only the economy that's afforded by interactive fiction but the power it has to sustain, to enthrall. the ambition here is felt in the narrative complexities time and time again, in all that you can do for the worst case scenarios amidst best intentions. a lot of built in forgiveness in the save system but the amount of open narrative here, you'll find yourself committing to decisions regardless of outcome. that's everything for me, personally -- when the story continues after setback, after a loss. when you're afforded a holistic experience. and i get the impression that when i revisit this world a second time, i'll be afforded that rich rpg experience novelty. going through it all again with different contexts leading to different words said, familiar doors closing for those yet opened. such a rich experience to be left with this sense of total possibility. beyond this game itself, i can't wait to see what this leads to further, through iteration or inspiration.

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

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

I think in a way I played this game at the perfect moment in my life. As I tried to become a better DM in our weekly tabletop RPG campaign I was thinking about fictional worlds, the structure of stories, and how characters interact with each other and the player a lot lately.
Then I played Roadwarden. A game that would best be described as a chimaera with the head of a visual novel, the body of an RPG, and the legs of a text adventure. In the beginning, the game lulled me with its beautifully atmospheric pixel art and its equally fitting melancholic music. But it wasn't long before I was fascinated by its world. A rough world, where survival isn't a given and death lurks around every corner. Where every little hamlet, every path through this land had to be painfully carved out of the wilderness and relentlessly protected against the wild beasts (one of which is humanity itself).
But the aspect that really made me fall in love with this game was how it handled the player's involvement in this world and the web of relationships the player has to navigate. I never felt railroaded, always in control. There was no clear direction to take, not even a clear goal. And so it felt more like a real world, like a real life I was living. I was trying to improve things, yes. But ultimately I was just a small cog in this machine that will keep on running long after I finished the game. Every decision I made was mine. Every path I took belonged to me. Every friendship I made along the way was personal. In the end, there isn't the best way to play this game. Not the right decision to make. Not the correct path to take. Every player's story will differ, no outcome will be the same. It was my story and my story alone. Never has a story in a game felt so personal to me.

Even after ending my first run of the text-based adventure game "Roadwarden", I found myself wanting to explore more of its world. Roadwarden is a non-linear adventure game set in a harsher fantasy world, I quite love the simplicity of its vague pixel art style, helping the player imagine the layout of the area they are in, while allowing the text to spur your imagination on the scene, while the soundtrack carried its cozier tone experienced through the player's connection to the characters of this world. What impresses the most is how well the game keeps you engaged, where the pacing is impeccable. This is all accompanied by a great text, where I never found it to be repetitive, unresponsive, or too restrictive, while also managing to be fairly accessible to players with no background in text-based adventure games. Its non-linearity works very well for its nature as a role-playing game, and not once did it feel like I was doing things out of order. highly recommend it!

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.

Simply incredible. After Golden Treasure and Citizen Sleeper, I was sure there's no way that 2022 would have another great text adventure ready for me. But Roadwarden is not only great, it is amazing. I will preach it's grandeur with the zeal of a priest, I swear in Wright's name.

Dense and organic worldbuilding that has a big and detailed peninsula unfold before you, seemingly growing only larger the more you learn about it, a huge cast of varied and detailed characters, incredible freedom of choice not only in dialogue but even in combat, I can barely stop gushing.