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.