Roadwarden

This engrossing fantasy RPG may be predominantly text-based, but one of its finest tricks is entirely visual. A large window dominates the centre of the screen, containing flavourful descriptions of the place you’re visiting or the people you’re conversing with, above the available actions or answers.

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To the right is a sidebar noting key stats, as well as options to wait, travel or check your inventory. On the left, your location is illustrated in isometric pixel art, using an eight-colour palette of yellows and browns. In key locations, these images come together piece by piece as you explore them, adding to the thrill of discovery.

One delightful early twist on this sees a settlement instantly fill the window as you clamber up to a high vantage point. But it’s often what you can’t see that fascinates you most: when you explore the area around a locked building, leaving a blank space at the heart of the image, or when you arrive at the gates of a plague-ridden village and can’t see beyond its boundaries, the text withholding enough to encourage you to imagine the horrors for yourself. That extends to the map of the peninsula you’ve been charged with exploring; it’s the gaps that most intrigue, as you wonder about the mysteries that lie within them, waiting to be found.

That’s fitting for a game whose greatest triumph, perhaps, is that – for all the scrapes, near-misses and discoveries – you spend as long thinking about the path not taken, the choice ignored, the quest begun but never completed. Because you quickly learn that, as you map out this loop of road, you will not be able to fulfil every goal, solve every problem, uncover every secret, or chart this place in its entirety. It’s not simply that there isn’t enough time, though your 40-day limit on the default difficulty setting adds extra pressure, but that making one person happy may disappoint another; you might plan to connect the settlements here, but there is often enmity between them, schisms that cannot be spanned.