icbmoose
@icbmoose

I don't have a full game of the year list in me, but I want to talk about this game and how much i like it, in the hopes it gets some more much deserved attention. It's uncontestedly my favorite game of 2022.

There will be minor spoilers in here. Talking about what I like necessarily involves talking about things that happen in the game. I won't be mentioning endpoints to any particular threads.


I really like fantasy where the main character is as much or more a participant as a protagonist. Roadwarden does an extraordinary job at this. A roadwarden, the job title of the character you inhabit in Roadwarden, is a person with a weird job that sucks. They have a broad set of duties and expectations that primarily consist of infrastructure maintenance and being a sort of mail carrier through hostile wilderness for the population nearby, sometimes extending into expectations of policing, with the actual authority thereof fairly nebulous. Between the opening of the game and the extensive notes to read, you learn the odd specifics of the job - somebody must appoint you to do this, but there isn't a lot governing who can appoint who besides "has the money to make it official with the people who care." As such, roadwardens tend to be either have a powerful friend giving them the title as a treat and not really doing the job, or a powerful non-friend who has some sort of leverage to actually make them do this awful job that sucks (and probably more). Whatever character you make for this game (and there's a broad set of options) you fall into the second category in some fashion.

What you are actually participating in is an attempt to make a hard to reach geographic region more legible to an economic force that wants to expand into and exploit it. You can certainly play to influence specific outcomes, but it is clear that whether you are there or not, an attempt at this expansion WILL be happening, and the people of the region will be reacting to it - I was always struck by the way that many of my main acts upon the world, which actually changed the reactions of people and places within the game, were as a clarifier or muddier of information. People are out there acting and being acted upon whether you show up or not, you just happen to be that dumbass who got coerced into having to travel around far enough that you have information from outside their scope. The accuracy of said information is often in question, though - At the time I played the game, I was also reading Shadow and Claw, and I think there is a fun comparison in the way both works deploy people who confidently assert truths whose accuracy is outside the scope of both the main character's and reader's knowledge.

On the subject of scope, I can't gush about every thing in here that I like, but I do want to mention one last part of it that really worked for me: I found myself really enamored with the way my roadwarden could be textually queer by actively and enthusiastically participating in queerness which was written as an active and living part of the world. In a particular town, I was welcomed into a group of non-monogamous lovers of various genders and given a say over how and how extensively i participated in their circle, and in a genre and medium that often beef the subject of queerness pretty hard, it was a really nice thing to encounter.

Oh also you have a horse who is your friend, and most people you meet haven't seen a horse before, so there's a lot of people who on the daily see gryphons and the undead bodies of their loved ones and such being absolutely in awe of a normal horse. That's delightful as hell, to me. Please play Roadwarden.


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