First and hopefully not the last time when I felt in love with a character I haven't even seen, I would do anything and everything for Eudocia

I really wanted to like this game but it slowly lost its charme a third into the game. The premise and general setup of the story were very intriguing to me and while I enjoyed the world building to some extent, it just felt like a chore after some playtime. I quit two thirds into it and I don't feel like I'm missing out, honestly.

Good: The soundtrack is pretty much perfect. The worldbuilding is quite lovely whenever it is in focus and the art style is a thing to behold.

Bad:

1. As is the case with story rich text-based games, reading a bunch of text is pretty much the only way to glean relevant information, but Roadwarden tends to just shove a bunch of fillertext on screen and intersperse the relevant information and worldbuildung throughout, which gets tedious after a few hours of playing. It happens with characters, who retain a certain importance throughout the narrative aswell as less important side characters, some of which you'll never meet again after the first encounter. It very much feels like the devs "playing for time" in a way.

2. Whenever you meet an important person you get to make a first impression via emotional reactions. Problem is: They seem inconsequential. I never really had a change in story depending on the way I react to people, be it intimidating or vulnerable or whatever else I chose. Seems like a way to fake depth in dialogue.

3. The stat system was also somewhat confusing when looking at the appearance stat. While it shows a minimum score of 0, it can fall below that due to torn or bloodied clothing. So whenever I was at 0 (-1) appearance and gained two points in it, it would show me a score of 1 instead. Confusing and unnecessary. A sixpointed star asset and a max score of 6 would haven been perfectly fine, why hide a negative score? Why not go for 0 to 6?

That's what comes to mind off the top of my head.

If you like this style of game, have at it. You might enjoy it a lot more than I did.

I personally would not recommend it though.

Yet another slow paced text adventure, i have my guilty pleasures. A unique spin on things, this feels like a love letter to the old fashioned games in the 90s!

Roadwarden

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22 hours

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so much voiceover/reading cough cough

3 deaths