Roadwarden

This game enthralled me. I got lost in it for hours. Easy recommendation. If you enjoyed Disco Elysium, you will surely like this. Though just in case it's not clear yet: this is closer to a book than a video game. The Good: The writing is excellent, and ultimately that's what makes the game. The music... Wow. 10/10. I can't believe that a text-based combat encounter can get this exciting. Again, the writing is excellent. I felt like a child. I caught myself replicating the encounter with the corpse eater in my kitchen. I'm a grown man. I dont even do this for action-packed games. What a blast. I *felt* like I had agency and my choices mattered. I don't know if it's true, but I'm not sure that matters. The difficulty is on-point. It gives meaning and weight to your choices, while still allowing you to play how you want. Things are nuanced. I was making varied choices, changing my mind, making wrong assumptions, etc. This is not the "Pick the good option or the evil option" system from Mass Effect. Understanding the world is useful in the various encounters. There are good and bad ways to do things, and you can figure it out if you understand what's going on. The Bad: The game asks you to make a big decision that you can't really understand. You're meant to decide whether to convince the villages to join the city of Hovlovan (your employer) or not, but you (the player) don't know what this entails. There are bribes of information here and there, but it's not enough, and you're already down a path by the time you get them. And this choice matters a lot to how things turn out in the end credits. This is compounded by the fact that your character is not amnesiac or anything. You should know these things. To be honest, this whole aspect of the game felt a bit too ideological to me. Also, at the very very end, on the last screen, the game tells you what the future of your character is. Not a fan. I've been playing this dude, making the choices. I had a picture in my mind of his motivations, and his plans for the future. It felt weird at the end to have agency taken away from me, and have judgement issued from above. You could've just taken out that last screen.

When someone ends the Roadwarden, he feels sad for abandoning that magical world. So beautiful it is to inhabit in it.

Eh. I feel a bit cruel listing this as "Not Recommended" given the rave reviews, because my only major reason for doing so is that it just wasn't impressive. Not that this was bad at all. It's a more than functional RPG that'll sate fans of works like Citizen Sleeper. The setting is a neat mixture of Wild West-esque frontier dwellings and untamed wilderness, pretty unique for a fantasy RPG. Letting the player construct their background in Hovlavan by asking them random questions and letting them build a setting piece-by-piece is a brilliant idea, one that I honestly wish was mechanized and incorporated as more than just flavor. It's in moments like that that the setting is transformed from a readable concept to moldable clay. The meaning of the story can change depending on what context and background you supply your character. Unfortunately, I just think the game squanders those moments by being a bit too meandering. Outside of investigating the previous Roadwarden's disappearance, the player character doesn't have a central goal or plot beyond "investigate the peninsula", which is pretty nebulously defined. You wander from town to town, do odd jobs, performatively manage resources (a la Citizen Sleeper) to remind yourself that there is, indeed, a game. The prose is solid, but it suffers from having a POV-agnostic bent to it, catering to most/all possible backgrounds you could envision for your character and winding up a bit inert as a result. The locations and people you visit are all a baseline level of interesting, but too transient, and the prose doesn't do a good job of imparting character traits beyond directly stating them. Lastly, it commits what I consider an RPG cardinal sin: it relegates a lot of its worldbuilding to unrelated, fractured glossary entries. Nothing breaks my immersion more than going, "Oh, what's that term?", only to have to read 5 glossary entries on a concept my character, as a resident of the universe, should know like the back of his hand. A lot of this is very, very nitpicky. I think for most RPG fans, this will at least satisfy, though the Steam UI is asking me if I "recommend" this game, and the answer is unfortunately no. There are better RPGs out there.

Super interesting game. Never thought I'd start a second run right after finishing my first 15h run. A perfect little gem. It's a wonder that this was built in Ren'Py

英文差的人体验会非常非常糟糕，哪怕打了汉化mood也一样。有环节是需要输入关键英文线索来推进的，不知道英文只能干着急。游戏本身还不错，但真的很需要官方本地化 we need chinese

This game takes place over 40 days unless you turned that off. It's okay, I don't feel like your choices matter all that much and there is a lot of disconnect between what you actually do and the impact of that depending on your choices. It's not a bad game but it's not great either. I think I'm about half way through my playthrough but I am too bored to finish it, I wasn't bored when I started playing. The lore is good and worldbuilding is solid, I think maybe there wasn't enough of what I was looking for to keep me invested or hook me, and I think 5 hours would be more than enough to hook me if it were going to. Maybe I'll revisit it another time.

我从未在如此平静的结局中这样热泪盈眶过这游戏好吗这游戏太好了，这样的游戏能不能再给我来一百个，玩得好满足好开心，我多年后也一定会反反复复地想起这个游戏。感谢民间汉化组的付出，文本量这么大没有中文我肯定没法流畅地打完这个游戏。 本作世界观和角色都非常鲜活，因为极富生命力而吸引人。叙事厚重真实，人们的合作与分歧，友善与隐瞒，这些事就像实际发生过一样让我觉得这个世界仿佛真的在那里。本作没有任何噱头地讲好了一个故事（也可以说是数个故事）。主角并非是拯救人们的英雄，而是在自己的轨迹从他人的故事中经过时尽可能地带来那么一点好的影响的普通人，这点真的很符合我口味。 本身可玩性也很强，略带生存要素的玩法在本作优秀的文本下表现极好，虽然地图不算大，但不同进度下同个地点会触发不同对话和事件，整个流程都能保持新鲜感。 游戏的视听体验也可谓绝佳。bgm很好听，丰富的环境音极大程度地提升了代入感，因为我还是像素爱好者所以可以说是看爽了听爽了玩爽了。 游戏感受是我像亲自踏上旅途历经种种最终结束了一段征程。 而最后我也得偿所愿。

I liked the concept. And from the start the world feels real and foreign from the one you and I reside in. If worldbuilding is your favorite part of fiction, this may be right for you. However, it is a story-driven game, and the story and writing I ultimately decided (after 5 hours) are lacking. Another reviewer put my thoughts into words: "In a game with no traditional gameplay loop, every paragraph needs to earn its place, and too often it didn’t, and much of it felt like filler."

Да. Отличный лор, запоминающиеся персонажи, хороший текст, приятная музыка. Мир меняется от твоих действий, ты волен делать что хочешь с судьбой что всего полуострова, что отдельных деревушек, жители которых с удовольствием будут отмечать твои заслуги. Богатый бестиарий, который гарантирует уникальные, хоть и немногочисленные, встречи с монстрами на протяжении ~30 часов, к каждому из которых нужен свой подход. Вот что должны показывать по России 1, короче говоря. Разрабы молодцы. Советую проходить на средней сложности, чтоб не было поблажек, а 40 дней вполне хватит для того, чтобы сделать практически всё что можно. 30-ти бы мне вот не хватило, Астериона нашёл как раз на 40-й день. Из минусов отмечу лишь скудный визуал, хотелось бы видеть больше артов, например, с персонажами и монстрами, а не только общие планы деревень, полей и лесов. Нейроперевод неплохой, но косяки есть, в мелочах в основном. Жаль править никто не будет :(