Wayhaven Chronicles: Book One
Your first case as a detective is forcing you to open your eyes to a world bigger than you thought. Or maybe it's better to keep them closed. Seems the supernatural didn’t get the memo that nothing exciting ever happens in the little town of Wayhaven.
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Roadwarden on Steam
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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.
Roadwarden is a rpg, text-based and adventure game
developed by Moral Anxiety Studio
and published by Assemble Entertainment.
Released on September 12th 2022 is available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Steam Deck and Steam Machine.
It has received 4,492 reviews of which 4,222 were positive and 270 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.1 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 10.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 0.49€ on K4G.
The Steam community has classified Roadwarden into these genres:
RPG
Text-Based
Adventure
Indie
Pixel Graphics
Interactive Fiction
Story Rich
Choose Your Own Adventure
Choices Matter
Fantasy
Multiple Endings
Visual Novel
Atmospheric
Dark Fantasy
Singleplayer
Mystery
Detective
LGBTQ+
Great Soundtrack
Crime
Here is the detailed breakdown of supported languages for Roadwarden:
| UI | Subtitle | Audio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| English |
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Roadwarden through various videos and screenshots.
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 10/7/8/8.1/XP/Vista (32 or 64 bit)
- Processor: 2.4ghz Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia 260 GTS or Radeon HD 4850 - 512 MB of VRAM or equivalent
- Storage: 2 GB available space
MacOS
- OS: Version: 10.10 or higher
Linux
- OS: TBD
Steam Price & Best Deals
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This isn't really a review. I mostly want to talk directly to the writer/developer, and to anyone interested in writing, about something very specific in Roadwarden's writing. I genuinely think it's one of the main things holding the game back from being something of a masterpiece. I'm not saying "write better." I'm trying to explain precisely where the writing loses its grip and what I think would make it stronger (in the hope that it's useful to anyone who reads this). First, the good: the worldbuilding is phenomenal. The world feels deep, interconnected, and full of things worth discovering. More importantly, the way you interact with it is unusually ambitious. Being a text-based game means you can have an enormous range of interactions without needing an animation or art asset for every possibility. You can type almost anything that comes to mind, and if it exists in the game and is even somewhat reasonable, the game reacts to what you're trying to do, even when it fails. The range of things you can attempt, and how far their consequences can reach, feels deeper than most RPGs I've ever played. Before getting into the issues, I want to stress that this isn't a problem with the writing all the time. I'd say the writing works fine for roughly 80% of the game, and toward the later parts I actually felt the prose become noticeably more competent and this problem occur much less often. It's precisely because the weaker moments stand out that I think they're worth pointing out. Spatial/Temporal Continuity and Embodiment This is the heart of my criticism: Roadwarden often gives me perfectly understandable individual details without giving me the relationships between those details that let me actually inhabit a scene. I can understand every sentence individually, yet still fail to build a clear picture of where I am, where everyone else is, how we got from one point to the next, or how one action leads into another. It's almost as though the game's isometric, distant visual perspective sometimes carries over into the writing. I feel less like I'm seeing the world through the Roadwarden's eyes and more like I'm a drone floating above the scene, or a god who can see everything at once. I know what the carpenter is doing, what the bird is doing, what someone across the room is looking at, and what happened somewhere else a moment ago, but I don't necessarily know what my character is seeing, how close these things are to him, or how his attention moves from one thing to another. It's an omniscient view of a scene where I want an embodied one. Characters sometimes seem to jump between physical states. One moment someone is sitting down, then they're picking at the ground, then they're looking at the sky, then they're back to sawing a plank. None of those actions are impossible. The problem is that I don't know what connects them. Why did they look at the sky? Did something above them catch their attention? Did my character look up because they did? Are they still sitting in the same place? The details are there, but the relationship between the details isn't always there. And that relationship is what lets the reader actually construct a scene rather than a list of things that happened. I just entered a scene where Helvius tells me to follow him. He dashes forward and hits a skeleton, then somehow we're back at the well and he's pointing out a corpse. I understand the sequence of sentences, but I don't really understand the scene. Where was I standing? Where was Helvius? Where was the skeleton? How did I follow him? Where was the well in relation to all of this? The game can be extremely specific about the appearance of a footprint or the color of a bird, yet sometimes the much more important information is missing: where everyone actually is and what is happening around me. The temporal side of this is just as important. Sometimes I press a button and a wall of text tells me that the next several minutes happened. I don't get to go through the event with my character; I get the event afterwards, already summarized. It creates a strange feeling of being slightly behind my own character, as though I'm reading a report about something that happened to him rather than experiencing it myself. This is something Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper do exceptionally well. It's not that they necessarily have less text. You can read enormous amounts of it. But they carry you through the writing paragraph by paragraph, moment by moment. Something happens, you process it, you react, something changes, and then you're carried into the next beat. You're continuously being brought along with your character instead of being handed the whole completed sequence at once. That's why I can read 500 pages of Blood Meridian and be completely absorbed, then read four paragraphs of Roadwarden and feel like I'm doing homework. I don't think that's a problem of length. It's a problem of how the writing carries me through time. The physical descriptions suffer from the same underlying problem. Someone taps their stomach while we're talking about something serious. Why? What emotion or situation is that supposed to convey? Sometimes it feels like the characters are simply doing something every few seconds because the prose needs to describe something . It's technically descriptive, and often quite specific, but specificity isn't the same thing as meaning. A physical action can make a scene feel more vivid when it is connected to the character's emotion, the environment, or what is happening around them. Otherwise it can feel arbitrary and actually interfere with the picture I'm forming. I don't think the answer is "use less description." I think it's use more purposeful description, and make the relationships between details do more work. Let the carpenter work on an intricately designed chair while we talk about someone he hates. Let him chip too hard when that person comes up, damage the chair, stop to examine what he's done, try to repair it, and continue the conversation. Now his work, his emotions, the physical environment, and the dialogue are all part of the same scene. The details have a relationship to each other. The same applies to larger events. When the carpenter gathers everyone in town, I'd much rather actually go through it with him: we leave the workshop, he gathers the villagers, someone asks a question, I choose whether to worry the crowd or calm them down, I see their reaction, and eventually we return inside. Instead, sometimes I choose one action and get a wall of text explaining that an entire sequence of events happened, after which I'm simply somewhere else. The game has made me the Roadwarden, but in those moments the narration turns me into a spectator of my own actions. And that's what makes this so frustrating: the game itself has already solved the hard part. It gives me a world worth exploring, an enormous amount of freedom in how I interact with it, and consequences that can reach far beyond a single conversation. I don't want less writing, and I don't want less description. I want the writing to make those things cohere. I want to know where my character is standing. I want to understand what he sees when he looks up. I want to follow someone through a space rather than simply be told that he led me somewhere. I want to experience a conversation changing a person's behavior, rather than watch their hands perform an unrelated gesture between lines of dialogue. I want to go through an event with my character instead of arriving at the other side of it in a paragraph. I don't need to see the whole world from above. I need to know where my feet are.
When someone ends the Roadwarden, he feels sad for abandoning that magical world. So beautiful it is to inhabit in it. This game made me wonder many questions regarding our own reality: What could have happened if a colonial power never entered in contact with a less powerful and different civilization? The settlement of Howler's Dell has its own religion, culture and relationship with nature. The druids preach and try to address a close and respectful relationship with their environment, knowing from their ancient history of many generations the results of not doing so (the wrath of the herds). His form of life is spiritually fulfilled and some of them even try to decrease their own economical growth; yet, their form of life is threatened by the greed of their leader and many other inhabitants, who know the potential of a trade covenant with a great city. Similarly, the Tribe of Green Mountain has a tragic history. They were living for generations in High island until the emperors and their brigands, motivated by greed, trampled over them, not granting any mercy upon them considering they were only "pagans", thus they were slayed and turned into slavery, after that, the survivors of the fallen nation escaped slavery or death and established in the eastern part of the peninsula ever since, hoping that some day they would be able to recover their land. They began telling their newer generations stories of their previous home. My roadwarden was a scholar and follower of The Wright and the Order of Truth; he arrived full of prejudice which only grew when he heard about the pagan rituals and the necromancers, disposed to erase that dangerous heresy, but somewhere along the road he encountered the truth from the old druid, the "forest speaker", and he began to respect him and unknowingly became his disciple. Furthermore, nearing the end of his journey to find the previous roadwarden who disappeared in the wilderness, he faced the Tribe of Green Mountain. Hearing their history led him to struggle with his own faith and he confronted it... After learning the deeds of that people, he changed, he knelt down and prayed to the old spirits who would aid him in his last and most important journey, hoping he could repay them somehow. I wanted to do something to avoid the contact between the inhabitants of the peninsula and the city of Hovlavan, I wanted to avoid the officials and the guild merchants from forming bonds with its people, which could not follow anything good. Some day the stories of those people would disappear and be forgotten, and their form of life would die forever or transform profoundly. But even if I avoided my duty, the merchants would hire another person until finally they could obtain what they wanted.
This game enthralled me. I got lost in it for hours. Easy recommendation. If you enjoyed Disco Elysium, you will surely like this. Though just in case it's not clear yet: this is closer to a book than a video game. The Good: The writing is excellent, and ultimately that's what makes the game. The music... Wow. 10/10. I can't believe that a text-based combat encounter can get this exciting. Again, the writing is excellent. I felt like a child. I caught myself replicating the encounter with the corpse eater in my kitchen. I'm a grown man. I dont even do this for action-packed games. What a blast. I *felt* like I had agency and my choices mattered. I don't know if it's true, but I'm not sure that matters. The difficulty is on-point. It gives meaning and weight to your choices, while still allowing you to play how you want. Things are nuanced. I was making varied choices, changing my mind, making wrong assumptions, etc. This is not the "Pick the good option or the evil option" system from Mass Effect. Understanding the world is useful in the various encounters. There are good and bad ways to do things, and you can figure it out if you understand what's going on. The Bad: The game asks you to make a big decision that you can't really understand. You're meant to decide whether to convince the villages to join the city of Hovlovan (your employer) or not, but you (the player) don't know what this entails. There are bribes of information here and there, but it's not enough, and you're already down a path by the time you get them. And this choice matters a lot to how things turn out in the end credits. This is compounded by the fact that your character is not amnesiac or anything. You should know these things. To be honest, this whole aspect of the game felt a bit too ideological to me. Also, at the very very end, on the last screen, the game tells you what the future of your character is. Not a fan. I've been playing this dude, making the choices. I had a picture in my mind of his motivations, and his plans for the future. It felt weird at the end to have agency taken away from me, and have judgement issued from above. You could've just taken out that last screen.
One thing I've always really enjoyed doing as a DM is giving players a chance to share in the worldbuilding. IE "You crest the top of a hill, what do you see?" Or, "You approach the innkeeper. What do they look like?" There aren't many instances I can think of where video games do this, especially after initial character creation. But this game does it in spades. In dialog you are frequently given the opportunities to further define your character, their place in the world, and the world itself. Decision paths at the end of each day give you the chance to reflect on how you've progressed, your past, and your dreams of the future. This rarely has any mechanical benefits, but is there for you to think, and to imagine. Roadwarden is a game with an imagination, and it expects you to have one as well. You will step into an untamed land to tame and shape it, your reasons and drive for doing so are your own, and victory comes in the form of conquest but also the satisfaction of a hard day's work and making life easier for the next traveler. Most of the game is communicated through text which is generally well written and mythical. The graphics are simple visual aids, but have a distinct style with a cohesive color palette, accompanied by moody music and ambient sounds like the distant howling of unknown creatures or a cool breeze shaking the branches. Roadwarden is also a game with a brain, and it expects you to have one as well. There is so much tabletop spirit here that the modern RPG blueprint has lost in the name of accessibility and convenience. There is an automatic journal but it doesn't enable you to sleepwalk. There is a map but there aren't quest markers. Simple actions are played out in multiple choice encounters. Your character skills and background help you by identifying what some of the wrong choices are, and often opens new paths. But it is up to you to make the final choice, and there's rarely a handy [PERCEPTION] tag or the like to identify for you what the objectively right choice is unless it would be obvious to one of your background. In dialog, your past experiences give you material to work with, but you need to make sound arguments and the New Vegas [SPEECH] win button is nowhere to be found. Combat is much the same. Playing a grizzled fighter with a martial history? You understand the fundamentals of combat and what not to do, those choices are axed. But the creature before you is still attacking. What are its features? How is it behaving? What tools do you have? You're new to this land, did you take the opportunity to ask a local hunter about the wildlife before you charged headlong into the wilderness? RNG is a factor but it is ultimately secondary to thinking about what you're doing and making sound decisions. When something more complex is in order, a text parser is introduced, and the guide-rails of multiple choice are removed entirely. If I had to make a complaint, I wish the game leaned into this last detail a little more often. In one town, you are not a particularly welcome guest, and you are not shown around and introduced to the locals. The parser opens and you need think about what features and government a fishing village may have and enter your choices by hand. Once you've identified them, they're added to a clickable list to easily return to. It would have an inspired approach to lean into this freeform approach more often. Further, your resources and statistics are simple, with vitality and cleanliness being the most significant. These dictate what interactions are available to you, but these thresholds often feel a little confusing and arbitrary, and by mid-game when you've built some wealth, it's very easy to mitigate the influence either of these have on your encounters. Overall Roadwarden is an experience I can easily recommend to RPG fans or the literary minded. Its blunders are few and are ultimately minor in comparison to the many ways it succeeds in rare form. I absolutely can't wait to see what this developer does next.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Roadwarden is currently priced at 10.99€ on Steam.
No, Roadwarden is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 10.99€ on Steam.
Yes, Roadwarden received 4,222 positive votes out of a total of 4,492 achieving an impressive rating of 9.05.
😍
Roadwarden was developed by Moral Anxiety Studio and published by Assemble Entertainment.
Yes, Roadwarden is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Yes, Roadwarden is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
Yes, Roadwarden is playable and fully supported on Linux.
Yes, Roadwarden is playable on Steam Deck, though it might require a few minor tweaks. Make sure to check the Steam store page and community feedback on ProtonDB for exact compatibility details.
Yes, Roadwarden is playable on Steam Machine, though it might require a few minor tweaks. Make sure to check the Steam store page and community feedback on ProtonDB for exact compatibility details.
No, Roadwarden does not support VR.
Roadwarden is a single-player game.
No, Roadwarden does not currently offer any DLC.
No, Roadwarden does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
No, Roadwarden does not support Steam Remote Play.
Yes, Roadwarden is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Roadwarden.
Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 30 September 2026 21:07 UTC |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 26 October 2026 07:04 UTC |
| Steam price | 26 October 2026 19:34 UTC |
| Steam reviews | 19 October 2026 08:00 UTC |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Roadwarden, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Roadwarden
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Roadwarden concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Roadwarden compatibility
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Game modes
Features
Online players
19
Developer
Moral Anxiety Studio
Publisher
Assemble Entertainment
Release
12 Sep 2022
Platforms
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