Text-based adventures have been around forever. They were even available on the old dial up BBS systems back in the day before, you know, the internet. Since the rise of indie content however they’ve seen a surge in popularity and the popularity of visual novels has helped as well. Today we’re looking at a new text adventure. It’s not quite pure text and it’s definitely not a visual novel, but Roadwarden from developer Moral Anxiety Studio and publisher Assemble Entertainment is more of a text RPG with light visuals.
In Roadwarden, you play, well, a Roadwarden. Your job is to patrol the roads of the peninsula and make them safe for the denizens. You’re also tasked with prepping the peninsula for the merchant’s guild to put their filthy capitalist claws in all the villages. In the standard game you have 40 days to learn as much as you can about the peninsula, make connections, and prepare. However, this is a huge game and there’s definitely not enough time to explore the entirety of the area, so you’ll have to pick and choose what’s important to you.
You have a variety of choices for character builds and backstory available to you in Roadwarden and they have a direct impact on your gameplay experience. Choose an atheist character and it may be harder to interface with some of the churchgoing believers in the game for example. Everything you do and say matters in Roadwarden and has a direct impact on how the townsfolk perceive you. This is a game that’s designed to give an expansive experience that will likely not be the same from playthrough to playthrough. With a game that takes a good 15-20 hours, that s a lot of opportunities that you may or may not witness. You could play on easy if you really wanted to though and ditch the day timer, but having that omnipresent countdown tickling the back of your brain changes the experience a bit and adds some realism.
This is a fairly dark game. If it were a fantasy novel, it would probably fall under the penumbra of grimdark fantasy, a relatively new genre that holds the likes of Game of Thrones of the works of Joe Abercrombie. The world of Roadwarden is brutal and unforgiving and while there are nice people, they definitely don’t trust you fully at first. One of the most interesting things about the game is that the people and their reactions seem noticeably realistic. You’re walking into town talking to strangers and they definitely don’t know who you are. Imagine that feeling if some random person came up to you and started asking you questions? How would you react? That’s pretty much how the NPCs in Roadwarden react and it’s a breath of fresh air.
There’s no handholding here either. This is a game where you have to figure it all out. The vast majority of the game is text and text selections, much like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Unlike the CYOA books however, you can’t just flip back to the previous page and take a different route. Your decisions are made and they have consequences here. Think about how you want to be seen by others and how you want to proceed because some doors will be permanently closed to you with the wrong choices.
There are also some interesting maintenance mechanics in Roadwarden. If you’ve played survival games of any sort, you’re familiar with needing to find food. While this is a text-based game, the same rules apply. You need to eat. You need to sleep. You need to stay clean. It matters what time of day it is. All of these factors affect the way you can interact with others or function in a fight. Sure, fights are a matter of selecting text options, but they also take into account your health and fatigue. If you’re too tired, there are some things you just can’t do and you won’t get the opportunity later. Sleep too much and you might miss out on other activities though. Everything in Roadwarden is a constant balancing act of factors, much like real life.
The visuals in Roadwarden are extremely minimalist. Text is presented on one side of the screen, images on the other. However, you don’t get character portraits or any of the fancy backgrounds you get with visual novels. Instead it’s a simple landscape or picture of a building or cave, or a map of a town with the parts you haven’t seen blacked out. The entirety of the game is also filtered in sepia, making it feel drab and dark and mirroring the game’s content. The GUI iconography is straightforward and adds convenient text explanations for images just in case they don’t make sense. Often you’ll have to choose between a number of different emotional response styles in order to make headway with characters and the simple icons help make that easier. But by and large this is pixel art and text, all in a brownish red that’s mellow on the eyes but helps create a strangely oppressive atmosphere for the game.
The sound in Roadwarden is similarly minimalist. Don’t expect a spectacular soundtrack here that you’re going to want to listen to on your device. Instead, you get subtle music that fits the mystery and slow, methodical nature of the game. The quiet soundtrack of the game can easily lull you into a relaxed state while you have to make challenging decisions. The sound effects are similarly straightforward, only showing up as needed. This is a quiet game overall and that approach suits it well.
Unfortunately there are some big drawbacks to Roadwarden on Switch. As interesting as the narrative is, the actual game interface is awful. If you’ve played a lot of text adventures on the system, you’ll be familiar with how they typically work, moving the stick to select the options you want and confirming with A. In Roadwarden, the cursor doesn’t necessarily move to where you want it to go however, forcing you to try to move about until you can get to the option you wish to select, whether it be the menu or a dialogue option. As a result, you’ll find it difficult to select text or open menus in the game and sometimes an additional button press is required to do so, making you second-guess whether you’ve pressed the button or not. It’s an incredibly frustrating process. There are occasionally areas where you have to free type with the virtual keyboard to put words in as part of puzzle-solving, and even those are impacted by the poor transition from keyboard and mouse to controller.
Moving to portable mode on the Switch alleviates some of the issues with controls. Roadwarden is touch screen compatible, which makes the game play much more like its PC counterpart. You can simply touch the spot you want to select, not worrying about the wonky stick controls. Sadly, you’ll still have to tap and additional time here or there though. The overall poor implementation of the controls significantly impacts the immersion level for players however, turning a uniquely dark and interesting game into a battle with menu systems and button presses. That’s a shame because Roadwarden is a fascinating game that deserves better and if you love story based games, it’s a blast to play.
All in all, Roadwarden is an excellent dark fantasy story with a wide variety of paths to choose from, interesting mechanics, and some fantastic world-building. Unfortunately on the Switch it is also plagued by a noticeably unresponsive interface that may ruin some players’ experiences by destroying immersion. If you’re patient and a bit forgiving, you’re going to get a lot out of Roadwarden, but be prepared to fight the controls. Hopefully there will be patches in the near future to clean up the interface, because that is the only thing that’s holding Roadwarden back from being a must-own title on the Switch!
This review is based on a digital copy of Roadwarden provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played noticeably better in undocked mode. Roadwarden is also available for PC on Steam and GOG.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.