We Love It's Guide to…
As a hired roadwarden, explore a dangerous peninsula, aid its villages, investigate its secrets, and shape your character through choices.
Released 12 Sep 2022
Reconnect Isolated Villages
Trace a Missing Warden
Manage Wilderness Survival
Roadwarden is an illustrated text-based RPG that uses isometric pixel art and combines mechanics borrowed from RPGs, Visual Novels, adventure games and interactive fiction.
Developed by Moral Anxiety Studio · Published by Assemble Entertainment
You take the role of a roadwarden sent by a merchant guild to a remote, unsettled peninsula. There, you travel between isolated communities, help their inhabitants, and investigate the region’s mysteries, including the fate of a previous roadwarden.
Most of the adventure unfolds through text, dialogue, and illustrated locations. You gather clues, question locals, take on quests, trade and explore; encounters, including combat, ask you to assess the situation and choose how to act. Some interactions let you enter your own search terms or questions.
You define your character’s background, beliefs, abilities, and approach, choosing among warrior, mage, and scholar. Your choices shape relationships and quest outcomes, while travel and survival call for managing resources such as food, health, and equipment. Many activities also take in-game time, making route and task planning part of the journey.
Reviewers who enjoy Roadwarden often praise its detailed setting, memorable characters, and choices that let them define their warden and affect how events unfold. Many also value its atmospheric pixel art and sound, and the satisfaction of piecing together clues without constant guidance. Some reviewers find the substantial reading, time pressure, or open-ended typed prompts challenging, and opinions differ on the pacing and prose.
A brave stranger putting your life on the line to make a difference in this grim fantasy world. While most people would never risk a solitary journey through the wilder parts of the land, you willingly accept the struggle. You guard travellers, connect isolated villages, support merchants, and repel attacking creatures, bandits, or even undead.
A powerful merchant guild has called on your services, sending you on a journey into the unknown planes of a mysterious peninsula in the hopes to expand the guild’s influence even further. Explore this world and gather as much information as possible to reveal the secrets surrounding the area. It’s a dangerous task, but an equally respectable one.
Roadwarden is an illustrated text-based RPG that uses isometric pixel art and combines mechanics borrowed from RPGs, Visual Novels, adventure games, and interactive fiction, such as inventory puzzles, dialogue choices, character abilities and progression, hit points, simple survival mechanics or quests restricted by in-game time.
Face the vast challenges of a hostile fantasy world in the 30-hour story-campaign
Create your own background, abilities, beliefs, and personality
Embark either as a warrior, mage, or scholar and define your character‘s attitudes
Immerse yourself in profound dialogues and sidequests with dozens of NPCs
Collect hints and investigate the true nature of this world
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
|---|---|
| Achievements | 43 |
| Age ratings |
|
| Controller required | No |
| Demo | Click the button and become a Roadwarden! |
| Metacritic | 83/100 View on Metacritic |
| Website | Official website |
