Roadwarden is a lot of fun
It's a 2022 indie game that just recently released its final update, and I started playing it on a whim and got super into it. Part of it was the fact I had a terrible day on a Tuesday and didn't feel like doing anything else, but if the game hadn't hooked me I wouldn't have wanted to play so much to begin with.
The main premise is you play as the titular Roadwarden in a fantasy world, who's roaming this newly reached peninsula following orders of the Merchant's Guild. Your objective, at first, is to make contact with the locals and convince them to join or at least negotiate with the Guild, who sees the new land as an opportunity to profit. What happens after that is all up to you, and the game gives you quite a few choices regarding background and personality. So, if like me you think the prospect of working for the Marchant's Guild uninteresting and evil, you don't need to follow their orders to a T. In fact, you can probably ignore them if you want to, as the job of roadwarden entails keeping the roads safe, and you can focus on that too… You kinda have to, to gain everyone's trust anyway.
That gives you an array of sidequests to do and environments to explore, from killing monsters (tougher than you'd think), to making the roads cleaner, to getting involved in politics, while keeping in mind a tight schedule of 40 days that keep getting shorter as autumn progresses. Sometimes the days feel too short and traveling takes a lot of time, so there's an interesting time management going on, and I was always planning what to do next because of that, which is what got me into that gameplay loop, I was always looking forward to something else. And ultimately, I managed to do everything I wanted to, but I know there were things I missed due to some choices I made. Since everything in the peninsula is connected, decisions made in a settlement might affect what happens in another one and so on.
The thing with this game is, it's all text-based. It's not a text adventure game per se — although it defintiely has elements of one —, but an RPG that's all told through text. There is music and artwork representing the environment to help with atmosphere, but the bulk of everything is text-based, from scenery descriptions to character meetings and even battles. And I thought it was wonderful. The narration is rich and gives the land a lot of texture — characters will have different accents and every gesture is narrated with a lot of character; cities and other locations will be described in great detail where you can feel it's a lived-in environment. The game does a great job of putting you into that space. Really, I think that's the second thing that drew me into the game, it pulls you in, and if at first I thought I might get tired of reading too much in one sitting, that ended up not happening since I was invested.
And I feel like what really tied the whole experience together for me was the atmosphere, this vague word I love throwing around. As mentioned, the descriptions are really rich and make the world feel lived-in with a history of its own, without delving into long world building exposition sections (there are maybe one or two, but no info your character should already know is directly spelled out). But what you do get to learn is that world is not doing well. Wars have destroyed the world, and the peninsula is ravaged by beasts, plagues, dark magic, bandits, and all sorts of other stuff. You can try and make a difference, but some things fundamentally don't change. It's a bittersweet feeling that makes the game feel cozy and melancholic at the same time, with just enough hope to not be too depressing. It's a sweet spot that really worked for me, and that, combined with the relatively small scale of the game and the freedom to go wherever you want, makes the progression satisfying, seeing things changing little by little as you uncover what you need to know. It's more a game about gathering info than anything else, the way I played it.
So it was definitely an interesting experience that I thought deserved a few paragraphs (even though I'm not a critic or a good writer or anything), especially since it consumed a week of my life which would have been pretty bad otherwise. It was inspiring even, being made entirely on the Ren'py engine, I could try to do something like that myself one day. But that's for the future. For now I have to finish a couple of readings and if I'm writing anything, it won't be an interactive piece.