I’ve been playing a bit of Roadwarden this week. Actually, I only played about 6 hours of it, then I gave up and started to listen to this delightful playthrough as an audiobook instead. I think Roadwarden is probably a good game. I think the problem may be that my attention span is just destroyed. But I am not yet sure.
How should I describe this game? How about this: have you ever played Pentiment and thought to yourself “nonono, this is too action packed and too interesting!”. Or what about… have you ever wished there was a game with as much text as Disco Elysium, but without any voice acting, visual art, humour, mind-blowing world building, charm or top quality near-poetic prose?
Roadwarden takes a lot of inspiration from the Witcher setting. It’s a low-magic, low-fantasy world filled with dangerous monsters, and you’re playing as a sort of peacekeeper. But instead of being a magical mutant with superpowers and steeped in centuries of interesting lore, here you’re instead playing as… just a guy. Just some dude meant to scout out an unmapped peninsula, get to know the locals and report back to your superiors in the big city who want to colonise (or at least exploit) it.
And that’s kind of just… the whole game. Granted, I’m not all the way through listening to the playthrough yet. But you’re just riding around, reading mundane descriptions of mundane things, helping locals with mundane tasks.
One thing I want to praise though, is how the game does player-customizable world building. At certain points you’ll get some questions about certain minor aspects of the world, and you can pick an answer out of usually 5-7. And whatever you pick will be the reality in your playthrough. Are people in the capital wearing tunics or furs? Is the capital well off or poverty stricken? What happened to that old inn on a street off the harbour? It’s something I haven’t seen before, and it does make every playthrough a little more unique. I found it neat.
I had a similar experience with Roadwarden. I played a few hours but it didn’t hook me and gave up on it. My verdict was that while the premise is interesting, the writing isn’t good enough to keep me invested.
Yeah. There are games out there with worse writing, but honestly that is not saying much. And when your “game” is literally only text, that text better be top fucking quality. And this isn’t really bad enough to be entertaining, it’s mostly just dull.
I have a lot of qualms, but there are two main problems:
Protagonist has extremely weak (almost nonexistent) personality and internal motivation
The overarching plot has no early hook, no emotional investment and no stakes.
Again if we take the Witcher comparison: imagine The Witcher 3 but you play as a cardboard cutout instead of Geralt, and the whole Ciiri storyline is completely absent. You just ride around doing contracts.
I’ve been playing a bit of Roadwarden this week. Actually, I only played about 6 hours of it, then I gave up and started to listen to this delightful playthrough as an audiobook instead. I think Roadwarden is probably a good game. I think the problem may be that my attention span is just destroyed. But I am not yet sure.
How should I describe this game? How about this: have you ever played Pentiment and thought to yourself “nonono, this is too action packed and too interesting!”. Or what about… have you ever wished there was a game with as much text as Disco Elysium, but without any voice acting, visual art, humour, mind-blowing world building, charm or top quality near-poetic prose?
Roadwarden takes a lot of inspiration from the Witcher setting. It’s a low-magic, low-fantasy world filled with dangerous monsters, and you’re playing as a sort of peacekeeper. But instead of being a magical mutant with superpowers and steeped in centuries of interesting lore, here you’re instead playing as… just a guy. Just some dude meant to scout out an unmapped peninsula, get to know the locals and report back to your superiors in the big city who want to colonise (or at least exploit) it.
And that’s kind of just… the whole game. Granted, I’m not all the way through listening to the playthrough yet. But you’re just riding around, reading mundane descriptions of mundane things, helping locals with mundane tasks.
One thing I want to praise though, is how the game does player-customizable world building. At certain points you’ll get some questions about certain minor aspects of the world, and you can pick an answer out of usually 5-7. And whatever you pick will be the reality in your playthrough. Are people in the capital wearing tunics or furs? Is the capital well off or poverty stricken? What happened to that old inn on a street off the harbour? It’s something I haven’t seen before, and it does make every playthrough a little more unique. I found it neat.
I had a similar experience with Roadwarden. I played a few hours but it didn’t hook me and gave up on it. My verdict was that while the premise is interesting, the writing isn’t good enough to keep me invested.
Yeah. There are games out there with worse writing, but honestly that is not saying much. And when your “game” is literally only text, that text better be top fucking quality. And this isn’t really bad enough to be entertaining, it’s mostly just dull.
I have a lot of qualms, but there are two main problems:
Again if we take the Witcher comparison: imagine The Witcher 3 but you play as a cardboard cutout instead of Geralt, and the whole Ciiri storyline is completely absent. You just ride around doing contracts.