Their shouts are like spells, and will make you sick.
Welcome to the final episode of Fanbruary this year! We’re going to be talking about Roadwarden, a largely text-based RPG that seemingly takes some inspiration from modern rules-light TTRPG design with a lot of richness to its text and a simple, obfuscated approach to combat and other randomness-based encounters. Set in a type of post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, Roadwarden tasks you with exploring a region and making numerous decisions in the interest of learning about the people there and surviving the wilderness. The game is full of dialogue and set events that give the player a lot of choice both in the ways that they interact with the world, but also how they shape the history of it and their place within it. On the flip side, that is also nearly all the game has. Dialogue and descriptions are many, many lines of text, and your reward for making your choices is often just more text. The mechanical side is predominately a game of resource management, with very few moments of genuine triumph to motivate you, so it falls squarely in the not-for-everyone camp. It’s definitely worth checking out if the storytelling elements of RPGs are what draw you to the genre, but you won’t get the other hallmarks of the genre here. We’re going to be talking about how the game plays against our expectations, how its difficulty creeps up on you over time, and how it somehow created an economy that perfectly mirrors real life.
Thank you for joining us again this week, and a special thank you to everyone who submitted their game suggestions for Fanbruary this year! As always, we had a blast going through some games we otherwise might never have played. Roadwarden in specific is one that is easy to see the potential in even it ultimately ended up not being up our alley. Have you played the game or did our episode make you curious about it? Let us know down in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re transitioning from an RPG that has been deconstructed from the basic parts that make up the genre, to one of the games that was pivotal in shaping that genre to begin with: we’re going to be talking about Final Fantasy (specifically the GBA “Dawn of Souls” version)! So we hope you’ll join us for that.