roadwarden is a game of crossroads. I guess I can't say "literally" because it's a computer game; yes, crossroads are a recurring landmark in its world but they are not literal, they are wrought of pixels and python. there is nothing literal about them, they were programmed with whitespace! but these game-critical waypoints function as convenient metaphors for ding-dongs writing lowercase reviews on semi-popular websites like this guy right here.

my first playthrough of roadwarden was rough, friends. you enter the game as the newly-assigned eponym, a roadwarden in a medievalish edge-of-wilderness in the process of being haphazardly tamed by a putative age of men. the known world has ten cities - exactly ten - and you have been sent by one of them to patrol an oversized cul-de-sac overrun with beasts, treants, shambling corpses, things that eat shambling corpses, and on occasion human beings. small towns with a range of faiths and superstitions dot the landscape, and one of your ever-progenitive tasks is to bring each township to heel for your sponsor city's plan to encroach on the area. on normal difficulty, you are given forty days.

I spent the first ten days in a desperate loop, shoving scarcities from one stat to another. I had stumbled into a time-sensitive sidequest that I didn't want to miss out on, but I couldn't complete it without at least two health. I had zero health. the best way to replenish health is to sleep in a bed, but I had no money for a bed, so I had to rough it on the floor, which does not replenish health. the next best way to replenish health is a day of rest, which burns one of your forty cycles, and can't be performed if you're starving - which I was. but I had no money to buy food, so I had to forage - which can cost health if you have any - or lay fish traps - which can take 2-3 days to pay out. and every day you go with poor sleep, you're getting grubbier and grubbier, which means people talk to you less, which closes off options for side hustles or acts of benevolence. burning one day on a freelance job to scare up two coins for a room in a tavern only to get unexpectedly injured and lose a point of health so now my good night's sleep only brings me back to even, the whole time being terrified the scavenger I'm supposed to escort out of the goblin town is gonna make a run without me and get himself killed, gave that gnawing dread one gets when paying off a credit card with another credit card.

it's a metaphor for capitalism, I tells ya!

(some reviewers have commented on "the looming specter of capitalism" being the game's true villain but -ADJUSTS GLASSES- properly it's the looming specter of feudalism, with the locals practicing a flavor of mercantilism inasmuch as there's any ism at all. capitalism exists only in metaphor here, but GODS BE DAMNED is the metaphor sharp!)

thanks to this early sandtrap, I didn't even make a full loop around the road I was allegedly warden of til past the game's halfway mark. as I neared the end of the season, the dozens of plot threads I had undertaken were tying up and braiding together in a range of fascinating ways, the game progressing in a thrilling rush where it had opened at a belly-crawl through mud and palfrey shit. I was clearing away rockslides and talking to hermits and investigating golems and scouring abandoned dolmens for secrets and sleuthing out culprits of a raid and attempting to cure a plague and nearly grasping the hot hobnail boots of my vanished predecessor. and that ain't even a third of it! the only town whose trust I had truly earned was the one I found the most corrupt. I hadn't come close to getting the ear of the necromancer in the north. half the fishing village was giving me the stink eye. but I was close - so, so close - to a couple of big revelations, I could feel it... when the last grain fell out of my hourglass. the leaves turned and it was time to go.

I actually finagled an extra day - it might've been a glitch - but I couldn't do much with it. I had nothing the forest speakers wanted. asterion was still in the wind. tulia and I rode back to havlovan and the endscreen told me that my past eventually caught up with me and I got shivved in some alley somewhere a decade or so later.

so ok. alright motherfuckface. I booted this bitch up again the next day, chose the exact same class and difficulty setting, and, as much as possible, attempted to make the same core decisions as my first playthrough, just faster and smarter this time. I knew what dangers were on the road and how to be prepared for them. I knew how much a good room cost and who could and couldn't be trusted. I built up the same checklist as before and tore through it. this time I did not blow half my money on crossbow bolts on day two. I saved that scavenger the same day I met him. I figured out how to address the druid in the southwest. I had me a sit-down with the necromancer. bam bam bam, I was crushing it.

and then the goddamn season ended again. time is the one resource you can't bank. and despite doing loads more during those first ten days, I still hadn't blown any lids off those big reveals I'd been working towards the first round. I'd even fully abandoned certain threads - did not bother with the shortcut through the heart of the forest, never met with the enchantress or the prelate. how had I done so much more, and yet so much less, and also the exact same amount?

so now I'm here, at a gods dang crossroads again. my next playthrough - and there's gonna be a next playthrough - can be one of two things: I can run the same build again but, this time, tweak the difficulty settings to give myself more time, OR I can play to specialize, pick a few threads I wanna get to the end of and ignore most of the things I've already done. the latter seems, somehow, more honest, and I think I would probably attempt a different build to make the repetition more novel - maybe I could have a roadwarden who can fucking read this time! - but my fingertips are itchy for the first option. there's just so much I never got to see, I don't wanna specialize and have to do three more runs to get to it all!

...or do I?

the roads beckon.