Roadwarden Reviews

A game I won't stop thinking about for a while. The writing was so well done! I loved how my choices impacted the story and how heavy these choices felt in the game. I really enjoyed befriending some of the npcs and seeing the growth between us as I furthered my mission as a roadwarden to help others. I surprisingly loved playing as a mage who could be proficient with my axe and crossbow! The world was beautifully crafted and I adore the soundtrack! The game will feel overwhelming at first, but give it a chance and you'll find an amazing rpg! 10/10.

Beautiful game, i highly advise anyone interested in the fantasy genre play this game. I get the reading can be boring but this games story is so in depth and has quite a lot of replayability.

One of the best games I've ever played. At the end I kept circling back again and again, hoping there would be more interactions to find. I'll play everything these developers make from now on

I love the dialogue options and they way I can peacefully immerse myself. The game is not stagnant in the slightest.

I LOVE this game It's soundtrack is just perfect, it's the right levels of crunch that you'd expect from 8-bit vibes, with just the right hint of nature in each track. Honestly It haunts my dreams. The art is perfectly distant like everyone in the game is. It's sharp and precise just like a Roadwarden needs to be. It's just so perfect. The gameplay plays like a choose your own adventure story book. There isn't really a tutorial, from the moment you start you're on the clock (if you play normal mode). It basically points at things in the UI and wishes you luck. You get to decide your characters Morals and Backstory based on questions asked to you by NPCs throughout the game, it's an incredibly interesting way to build a character. I really just love this game. 3 classes, 3 different time limit modes. It almost encourages you to play through it 3 times. If it's any help I've done 2. One as just the brute strength Warrior, and one as a wise pious scholar. My first play through was something like 28 hours (I played on the free roam mode and just explored everything), my second was just about 8 hours (40 day limit). Both times was an amazing experience, I HIGHLY suggest this game.

I absolutely loved this game. I played it when it first came out, enjoyed it, but didn't really grasp the best ways to approach the puzzles and world. I replayed it last month, doing two back to back plays, and had a blast. The story is a great blend of subtle world building and low fantasy. I really enjoyed that this is a game where making modest coin and surviving is 70% of the battle, and fighting things really isn't the main goal. The art style is fun and evocative, writing solid, the choices and branching paths gives a lot of potential for replay, and a single play through takes only 7-ish hours depending on your reading speed. Special shout out for playing this on Steam Deck. It's not technically verified, but other then some of the sections where you type in things, it worked great, and even those sections work okay.

I got the game on sale, played it for 30 minutes and then didn't come back to it for half a year. But when I finally came back to it I got sucked in -- the gameplay is really engaging and rewarding, particularly when I had long stretches of time to play. The majority of the gameplay is relaxing with gorgeous music: At one point I accidentally made a decision I didn't mean to make and had really tense moments that made it really exciting. There's something about a primary goal being to help people that is really relaxing and fulfilling. I wish there were more games like this and will definitely do another playthrough after some time has passed and my memory has faded!

I really wanted to like this game but it slowly lost its charme a third into the game. The premise and general setup of the story were very intriguing to me and while I enjoyed the world building to some extent, it just felt like a chore after some playtime. I quit two thirds into it and I don't feel like I'm missing out, honestly. Good: The soundtrack is pretty much perfect. The worldbuilding is quite lovely whenever it is in focus and the art style is a thing to behold. Bad: 1. As is the case with story rich text-based games, reading a bunch of text is pretty much the only way to glean relevant information, but Roadwarden tends to just shove a bunch of fillertext on screen and intersperse the relevant information and worldbuildung throughout, which gets tedious after a few hours of playing. It happens with characters, who retain a certain importance throughout the narrative aswell as less important side characters, some of which you'll never meet again after the first encounter. It very much feels like the devs "playing for time" in a way. 2. Whenever you meet an important person you get to make a first impression via emotional reactions. Problem is: They seem inconsequential. I never really had a change in story depending on the way I react to people, be it intimidating or vulnerable or whatever else I chose. Seems like a way to fake depth in dialogue. 3. The stat system was also somewhat confusing when looking at the appearance stat. While it shows a minimum score of 0, it can fall below that due to torn or bloodied clothing. So whenever I was at 0 (-1) appearance and gained two points in it, it would show me a score of 1 instead. Confusing and unnecessary. A sixpointed star asset and a max score of 6 would haven been perfectly fine, why hide a negative score? Why not go for 0 to 6? That's what comes to mind off the top of my head. If you like this style of game, have at it. You might enjoy it a lot more than I did. I personally would not recommend it though.

Be careful with your resources, and you may last long enough to discover the absolute gold at the heart of this game. Great story, fantastic characters, and enough hard choices to make you doubt yourself *at least* a dozen times. Satisfying all the way through. It's a lot of reading, so if you're not into that: skip it. But if you like story-rich RPGs, especially text-based ones, you'd be a fool not to check it out. Oh, and pro-tip: Stay skeptical. Things are not as they seem.

Well I have a library full of games I've never played but after a bad first try when I wasn't in the mood to read, I just sunk 60 hours of playtime into this game in 6 weeks, with 3 back-to-back playthroughs. If you loved Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid you will love this. The music is great, the writing is SUPERB, and the game world is awesome and unique.