Review for Roadwarden
In the late ‘80s, I stumbled across something strange and wondrous: a book that you didn’t just read but actually played! Armed with paper, pencil, dice, and my imagination, I jumped back and forth between numbered sections in a non-linear fashion and survived (or died, over and over) only by the skin of my teeth. Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! books, and the greater Fighting Fantasy canon they are a part of, aren’t exactly a novel idea nowadays, but back then, to me at least, they were something new and endlessly exciting.
Fast-forward three-and-a-half decades, and I’m playing Roadwarden, a text-based adventure by Moral Anxiety Studio very much in the vein of those old choose-your-own-adventure game books. You take on the role of the titular roadwarden, a brave soul whose job is to patrol the roads and paths between villages and settlements, keeping them and their travelers safe from beasts, bandits, and all manner of unsavory brigands. Along the way, the game allows you plenty of choice in what tasks you’ll take on and how you’ll try to resolve them, and in the process, has you slowly but surely figure out just what kind of individual you are and what you stand for.
By virtue of its player-surrogate protagonist, Roadwarden offers plenty of role-playing elements. You can shape your character into a selfish mercenary not afraid to get their hands dirty if it lands a few more coins in their pocket, a noble protector of the meek and defenseless, or anything in-between. It’s a fairly freeform game, even going so far as to ask you to decide what your personal motivation should be: are you content to be the tool of the merchant guilds, convincing the local settlements to accept new trade agreements, or are you looking to shed the yoke of capitalism, preferring to start a new life for yourself deep within the untamed wilds? Apart from a time limit that’s always slowly ticking down (it’s forty in-game days before the weather gets too cold and the roads too inhospitable to patrol any further), you’re free to spend your days and nights pursuing whatever quests and jobs you happen to stumble across. No final boss or ultimate task must be completed; the game ends when your allotted time has run out, or you decide you’re happy with what you’ve accomplished and pack it in.
After choosing your character class (maybe you’re a combat-savvy brute who has an edge in physical altercations or you call upon your intimate familiarity with the magical arts to aid you in conflict), you take your first steps into the untamed peninsula that will become your home for the foreseeable future. At first, the overhead map is nothing but a black void that slowly fills in with new discoveries as you start to travel. Navigation happens via this indirect overhead view, with each location, once discovered, displaying the amount of time it will take to travel there from wherever you presently are. There are only so many hours available to you each day – it’s too dangerous to travel at night and the days do get shorter as the season wanes – and most actions you can perform along your journey require spending some of that precious time.
While your job may bind you to the peninsula’s roadways, camping out in the open is far too dangerous. You must plan ahead and be near a village or other shelter before each day winds to a close, grab a bit of nourishment, and perhaps wash away the dust of the road. Roadwarden incorporates as many survival elements as role-playing systems. Charge headfirst into danger, and you might whittle away your armor and vitality; spend too long roughing it, and your appearance may take a hit. To succeed at your tasks, you must be ready to deal with people and beasts alike, and the constant upkeep of your gear and stats doesn’t come cheap. Gaining a foothold in the game’s early stages, before you’ve built up a cache of resources, is quite a brutal challenge and can often seem insurmountable. As stat penalties rack up and even a single night’s stay in a respectable inn once again wipes out your entire purse, it can feel like the game is stacked against you.
But with a bit of perseverance (and a few completed quests under your belt) comes the ability to amass a couple of coins to rub together. Once you’ve completed your first full circuit around the peninsula, discovered its settlements, and started building some inroads with its people, the game opens up pleasantly. Surviving your first few enemy encounters gives you a sense of achievement, and you’ll have some tangible objectives to work towards. There are even a handful of more involved, larger goals to chip away at, including lifting the veil on the disappearance of the previous roadwarden and mustering up the courage to enter the dark heart of the forest that all the locals are warning you to stay far away from.
Everything in Roadwarden, from adventuring and exploration to enemy encounters and village visits, is presented via a visual novel. Though you’ll decide your travel destinations on the map screen and frequently need to make routine decisions, the twenty-hour game is laden with chunky blocks of text from beginning to end. However, the writing is often quite good and generally easy to follow. One minor misgiving is the frequency with which descriptions of characters’ appearances – particularly details of their dress – are shoehorned into the text passages. Having a strong mental image of a few key characters makes sense, but the game soon beats this trope to death. On the other hand, effort was put into fleshing out the world with further details, particularly things like characters speaking with specific regional dialects depending on which village they hail from.
Decision-making is handled efficiently and is embedded right into the written passages as clickable lines of text, with characters and the world around you immediately reacting to your choices. While many decisions can have important consequences and implications, there are also plenty of routine choices with appropriate flavor text to support the game’s role-playing aspect. Occasionally, some options may be grayed out and unavailable, usually due to lacking a necessary item, not meeting the required stat threshold, or not having built up enough trust with certain characters – you may call yourself a roadwarden but, until you’ve proven yourself, trust is hard to come by. Enemy encounters play out similarly, with the diplomatic conversation options replaced with survival tactics, often even including whether to stand your ground or flee. Too many unlucky choices can result in the roadwarden’s demise, though you may simply replay the encounter if this happens. Outside of that, even dicey story beats can be reattempted with creative use of the save-anytime save system.
A quick peek at Roadwarden’s screenshots instantly reveals that there is more to this game than simply screens filled with text. The left side of the screen is taken up by a window that displays visual representations of your surroundings. While the game’s art style at first brush appears a bit on the simple side, the pixel art scenes soon prove to be impressively packed with detail directly pulled from the text. It's obvious that each location was painstakingly represented visually, with many flourishes directly mirroring the text.
This visual companion to your journey soon proves invaluable and lends the game’s setting a strong sense of place and geography. It’s thanks to this that locations like Foggy’s Inn or the abandoned watchtower resonated in my mind as if they were actual landmarks I had visited in real life. It’s a shame that no attempt was made to portray any of the game’s characters or creatures the same way. Character portraits (at least for key cast members) would have gone a long way to cementing them in my mind and alleviating the long-winded descriptions we get instead.
Roadwarden is an acquired taste. Anyone not interested in a lengthy, text-driven survival adventure need not apply, and even seasoned visual novel veterans will find the first act’s high difficulty curve will put them through their paces. Stick with it for a bit, however, and its qualities shine through more and more. It’s a slow burn rather than a breakneck thrill ride, but it runs like a well-tuned machine once it revs up.
