The keeper of 4 elements level 14 hard4/17/2023 But I also felt the meaningfulness of what I did achieve all the more. Like Asterion, I left behind a trail of fleeting victories and lingering disappointment. I had given my character the personal objective of building a new home on the peninsula, but she ultimately met her death as a mercenary many leagues away, unloved and forgotten. I finished my initial time-limited tour with around half my quest log complete, and was treated to a gruelling epilogue in which the consequences of my failures swiftly came to bury my - I thought, notable - successes: communities picked apart by imperial capital, then overrun by dark magic, half the settlements devastated, their secrets left to fester. There's the option to play with this restriction removed, but I think this misses something essential about Roadwarden, while also decreasing the incentive to replay and test out different starting vocations, dialogue choices and priorities on your to-do list. The merchant guild wants you to report back in 40 in-game days or less, beginning in late summer and ending with the onset of autumn. You have to worry about your health or “vitality” and strength or “nourishment”, but also, hygiene and tailoring: wander into town decked in rags and filth, and you may have trouble persuading locals to give you jobs or share knowledge about the wider world.Ībove all, you have to worry about the passage of time, which advances whenever you travel or undertake a task. Often, the best you can afford is a tavern bench or a pile of furs in a shack, which may leave you drained and dishevelled in the morning. Just staying in one piece is a feat: the woods crawl with griffons, bloodthirsty apes and giant spiders, so each evening you must find safe and, preferably, comfortable sleeping quarters, or take damage while journeying after dark. Nobody particularly wants you around, to begin with - and that’s assuming you’re here to help rather than lie, steal, intimidate and in general, drive everybody deeper into the muck. The peninsula is at once decaying and divided, awash with bad blood, questionable sorcery, religious differences and automatic mistrust sharpened by penury: to aid one village may be to incur the wrath of another. But the more I played, the more setbacks I encountered, and the more I came to identify with my missing predecessor. Your first few conversations with soldiers and innkeepers suggest a society of needy bystanders to be systematically won over by fetching herbs and rescuing lost puppies. There are no armies to slay and no ability trees to scale, though you might pick up a new axe and a fancier padded jacket on your voyages. ![]() ![]() This isn't Dragon Age or Skyrim, but a deceptively sleepy choose-your-own adventure with deceptively delicate RPG appendages, its locations consisting of terse yet evocative descriptions and nested dialogue choices, beautiful eight-colour isometric dioramas and a soundtrack of animal sounds and melancholy guitar. A carpenter wants you to shore up a ford. A couple of foragers need help lassoing and subduing a massive, flightless bird. Roadwarden's setting is hardly gigantic – dredged map node by node from the fog of war, it consists of a single road looping a dense, watchful wilderness – and many of the problems you encounter seem trifling. I admit, when I started the game I felt a little contemptuous of him. ![]() He exists now as a trail of unkept promises, deliveries not made, conversations unfinished and grand plans that seemingly went nowhere. Asterion haunts the peninsula much like the protagonist’s identity in Disco Elysium - a game with which Roadwarden has much in common, for all its Robin Hobb-esque historical fantasy backdrop. You spend a lot of your time in Roadwarden tracing the footsteps of the previous roadwarden - a man named Asterion sent, like you, into a swampy, forested peninsula to safeguard the paths against beasts and the elements, tend to a handful of villages, and assess the region's resources on behalf of a merchant guild back in the big city. A beautifully structured, rich and thoughtful adventure with gentle but decisive RPG elements.
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