Roadwarden review – one of the finest historical fantasies you'll play

You spend a lot of your time in Roadwarden tracing the footsteps of the previous roadwarden – a man named Asterion sent, like you, into a swampy, forested peninsula to safeguard the paths against beasts and the elements, tend to a handful of villages, and assess the region’s resources on behalf of a merchant guild back in the big city. Asterion haunts the peninsula much like the protagonist’s identity in Disco Elysium – a game with which Roadwarden has much in common, for all its Robin Hobb-esque historical fantasy backdrop. He exists now as a trail of unkept promises, deliveries not made, conversations unfinished and grand plans that seemingly went nowhere.

Roadwarden reviewDeveloper: Moral Anxiety StudioPublisher: Assemble EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC.

I admit, when I started the game I felt a little contemptuous of him. Roadwarden’s setting is hardly gigantic – dredged map node by node from the fog of war, it consists of a single road looping a dense, watchful wilderness – and many of the problems you encounter seem trifling. A monk awaits a package of fine quills. A couple of foragers need help lassoing and subduing a massive, flightless bird. A carpenter wants you to shore up a ford. This isn’t Dragon Age or Skyrim, but a deceptively sleepy choose-your-own adventure with deceptively delicate RPG appendages, its locations consisting of terse yet evocative descriptions and nested dialogue choices, beautiful eight-colour isometric dioramas and a soundtrack of animal sounds and melancholy guitar.

There are no armies to slay and no ability trees to scale, though you might pick up a new axe and a fancier padded jacket on your voyages. Your first few conversations with soldiers and innkeepers suggest a society of needy bystanders to be systematically won over by fetching herbs and rescuing lost puppies. How hard can it be, I thought. But the more I played, the more setbacks I encountered, and the more I came to identify with my missing predecessor.

The peninsula is at once decaying and divided, awash with bad blood, questionable sorcery, religious differences and automatic mistrust sharpened by penury: to aid one village may be to incur the wrath of another. Nobody particularly wants you around, to begin with – and that’s assuming you’re here to help rather than lie, steal, intimidate and in general, drive everybody deeper into the muck.