Roadwarden

Three years on from its initial release on PC, Roadwarden remains a phenomenal game. I started playing it back then, but because of other games releasing, I never took the time to finish it, to my shame. But with the game now arriving on the Nintendo Switch, I thought this might be the moment to pick up where I left off. This came with some caveats, though: I had tried playing the original game on Steam Deck before and found that it didn’t translate all that well to Valve’s portable console. But surely, for the Switch release, there would be some quality-of-life improvements. Right? Right…?

Let’s back up a little and first take a look at what Roadwarden actually is. Moral Anxiety’s 2022 game is an incredibly rich, text-based RPG where you play as the titular roadwarden. This is a single person designated to roam across a part of the land and, well, help out. You connect villages to each other, help travellers reach their destination, and do all kinds of other work to aid the locals. At the start of the game, you have just become the new roadwarden to a mysterious peninsula, and you are sent on a mission by a powerful merchant guild, who want you to convince the locals to join their network.

That will be easier said than done. All of the villages you encounter have their own economies, their own religions and beliefs, and they aren’t all too happy about giving all of that up just to join in with the riches on offer. But that doesn’t mean that your quest is impossible. By building up relationships with these villagers, they might warm up to you and your mission. That takes time though, and this 30-hour adventure will see you mostly having conversations and going on smaller quests, all the while keeping monsters and even the undead at bay as well.

There’s more to your mission than just trying to win people over, though. The previous roadwarden has gone missing, presumed dead. He used to patrol the same area that you have been designated to, so it’s entirely possible to set up your own investigation and find out what happened to them. Quickly you’ll learn that they weren’t beloved by all, complicating your search but also giving immense depth to the game.

This leads me to the best parts of Roadwarden: the writing and its worldbuilding. If you’re a fan of fantasy with deep lore, especially things like the Witcher series, you will find an absolute treasure of a game here. There’s so much history to the world of Roadwarden, so many cultures combined into one part of a massive, sprawling world. This can be found both in the options where you can customise your own character, with their background and belief system all being optional, but mostly this shows within the places you visit. There are incredible settlements to come across, but also the remains of destroyed places, the last remnants of life still having been left behind.

As someone who loves playing Dungeons and Dragons – but mostly prefers the world-building and roleplay side to the game rather than the combat – I found Roadwarden to be exactly the kind of experience I was looking for. There are so many more solutions to different kinds of situations than just punching someone in the face or slicing their head off. No, you don’t have the freedom that something like Baldur’s Gate 3 offers, but the options you are given already diversify what kind of roadwarden you want to be.

There are almost always different dialogue options to choose from, and when you meet someone new, you can even choose how to address them, whether you want to be friendly and unassuming or rather more threatening, or even vulnerable and honest. NPCs aren’t just limited to giving you the information you need as a player either. You can engage them in games, just have casual conversation, or ignore them entirely.

The depth of this game is incredible, especially seeing how it was made by a single person. Of course, this meant some aspects of the game didn’t receive much attention. Visuals, for example, are limited. Most of the game is played entirely through text, with the only visual cues being the pixel art pictures of the location you’re visiting. That said, this does more than enough to set off your imagination, making it easy to envisage yourself being at these places, doing the things you do. It also helps that the music in the background does an incredible job at setting the mood.

Truth be told, Roadwarden would easily be one of my favourite narrative stories I’ve played in a long while… if I had continued playing it on PC. Sadly, this review is for the Switch version of the game, and I do have to get into why its ultimate score is so low. First off is the performance. I played this on the original Switch, and the game is just incredibly slow on the console. With it being text-based, that’s not the worst thing in the world, but it does get annoying at times, as text stutters onto your screen, and some control inputs don’t even register on the first try.

Then there’s the cursor. With this being a console port, there is no mouse functionality, and it really is missed. The cursor jumps all over the place. Every time a new stream of text loads, the cursor will appear somewhere else, and at times I couldn’t even select the dialogue option I wanted to because the cursor simply would not go there. Luckily, the Switch’s touchscreen came to the rescue, but it’s far from ideal having to play this game in handheld mode only.

Another issue I encountered has to do with those moments where you can actually type in something yourself. At times, there will be prompts where you can choose to enter text instead of selecting from choices. Except that, well, in my case the Switch’s keyboard never popped up, so I could not use this functionality.

It might sound like I’m being overly critical about these issues, but they’re honestly bad enough to want to stop playing. And that’s really too bad, as I was hoping that this Switch release would make a whole new crowd of gamers find this game and love it as well. But I cannot recommend playing it on console at all.

That being said, I do recommend going back to the original PC release and playing that one instead. It goes on sale quite often for quite some hefty discounts, and you’ll have an absolute blast if you play it in its original state, especially being able to use the mouse and keyboard. And Roadwarden does deserve the love.