Personal Choices
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2022 (opens in a new tab), each member of the PC Gamer team highlights a game they loved this year. We’ll be posting new Personal Picks, alongside our main rewards, throughout the month.
Despite my love of fantasy books and games, I rarely clicked on text-based adventures, but not for lack of trying. I first said that Roadwarden felt like opening a giant fantasy novel, and if it did, I would now be hunting a hardcover copy for a place of honor on my bookshelf. Roadwarden nails the intersection between romance and adventure game in a way that, for the first time, doesn’t make me wish it was just one of those other things instead.
Roadwarden makes a great first impression visually. There’s no account for the taste, but personally I’m not tired of the two-tone retro pixel illustration style and it’s a fine example of the shape. It’s not just the style that’s accessible, but the visual design as a whole. Like much older dungeon crawlers, Roadwarden opts for a multi-panel design with text in the center, stats on the right, and artwork of your surroundings that changes as you explore each area.
All the while, there’s an ambient sound of screaming insects or running water intercut with the mellow soundtrack of the acoustic guitar I’ve since been playing on repeat throughout my workdays. Its style is certainly what convinced me to give Roadwarden a chance, and its soft colors and relaxing soundtrack set the tone for what turned out to be an equally well-tuned adventure.
Less is tradition
Roadwarden’s key success is that he knows when to lean on his bookish qualities and when to play his acting abilities. He handles world-building through exposition like a novel does – and a good novel, no less. . All fantasy is prone to the proper name problem and in fantasy action games, where lore is so often delivered in the dialogue, even more so than most. Roadwarden uses his stage descriptions and the main character’s internal thoughts to convey concepts such as a “shell” is exactly what people call their body, that all animals are more dangerous than what we know in our world, and the nuances of tension between the different human religions. Everything is subtly done, with a skill comparable to that of some of my favorite authors.
And that’s where other text adventures and visual novels have gone wrong for me in the past. If it’s as well-written and engaging as a book, I wish it was a book, not something I had to experience while sitting at my desk. But the narrative tension of Roadwarden, and my character’s place in it, is perfectly gamified. On normal difficulty, I only have 40 days to learn as much as possible and fix the problems on the peninsula before reporting them to my merchant guild customers. Traveling to any point on the map takes time, and can take longer in bad weather, and while those 40 days initially seem like enough, the last 10 really made me wonder how my weather was best. used and who I could really look for the answers I needed.
After choosing a difficulty level that determines my time limit and one of three character classes, Roadwarden begins in “choose your adventure” style: offering bits of exposition on the unnamed peninsula where I’ve been sent, followed by my choice of how to proceed from a list of actions. I can approach the seemingly abandoned fort I encountered with caution or waltz boldly.
Conversations unfold in familiar RPG trees of information-gathering questions and occasional tone-based moments where I can choose to be friendly, playful, aloof, intimidating, or vulnerable. Later on, these decisions carry more weight, changing the way certain characters treat me and their willingness to have information about the mysteries of the peninsula snatched from them. Its characters are as shrewd as their world demands, hiding details from me when I fell into conversational errors like commenting on a chef’s wealth, but their opacity always tempted me to discover them.
At the end of the 40-day period, I am supposed to have completed my study of the peninsula for my clients: negotiating the first talks with the four cities to make way for formal agreements with commercial corporations, eliminating dangerous animals and other risks. on the road and discover the secrets that its inhabitants are keen to hide from strangers. After that, I return to give my report and hear the results of my choices for everyone I met.
I spent about 10 hours on my first playthrough, carefully avoiding what I thought were risky choices, and it turned out that I totally failed to make trade deals, missed two places entirely, and learned little from things that my employers considered valuable. But the journey was so enticing and the puzzles of its characters thrilling to solve that I immediately started another adventure after the first to fix my biggest mistakes, playing aggressively and forever this time.
If I can give any advice, pick a fighter as your first class. Mine picked up a crucial clue early in the game that my mage didn’t understand. And remember to use the “casual” difficulty. Mysteries get tense even with no time limit.
Most years, I end up loving a handful of games that I had already anticipated. Roadwarden is one of the special experiences: a game that I had reservations about and totally scammed me.