Road Not Taken asked that I stop to consider every time I moved my jawa-like wizard around its grid-based maps. On one level I stared at the screen for about five minutes, contemplating every possible route to get the last child I needed to rescue to beat the area while avoiding a malicious black spirit that would drain about a fourth of my current health. But if I made too many useless moves here, I could end up without enough left to finish the next level. I eventually got to the child, but not without taking a spirit to the face - acceptable losses. That risk-reward balance is a clever hook at first, but it too quickly became less exciting as I played.

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Learning to match the varied animals, monsters, spirits, and other objects scattered across Road’s randomized levels in the fewest movements possible was, at first, unforgiving (leading to situations like my five-minute stumper). Every new object was a surprise, and some are as likely to end a good run on the spot as they are to help you out. But that’s to be expected from a Roguelike, where the first few sessions are more about learning the ins and outs than anything else.

Most Roguelikes remove all your progress on death, making your knowledge of what to expect next time around the most palpable form of progress; here that knowledge is solidified in the form of a persistent and indispensable notebook that fills out as you uncover new objects and combinations. Being able to look up what each piece I encountered could turn into got me out of quite a few jams, so I appreciated that I didn’t have remember how every piece fit together.

In filling out the notebook I gleefully poked and prodded everything around me, discovering unintuitive things like how two fire spirits and one ancient mortar create a nourishing apple. Even when the results ended up hurting me (word to the wise: don’t mix rabbits and spirits!), I knew that I’d benefit from knowing more about these interactions in the long run. This initial stage of discovery was the most exciting, since I was trying to learn more about how everything fit together and treated each level as a sandbox instead of a goal. Remember that dark spirit I had to tackle to get to the child? It became cause for celebration once I’d figured out how to turn it into something useful.

The discovery stage doesn’t last as long as I’d have liked. The same way that a large house begins to feel smaller as you become familiar with it, I began to realize that there simply wasn’t as much to discover or to do as it first appeared. Learning as many tricks as possible is all well and good, but once I had over half the of the secrets unlocked, I stopped tinkering and played more cautiously. The most common enemies are the ones worth learning; once you know your way around those, there isn’t much reason to learn the more obscure combinations.

After shifting into a more goal-minded gear, Road’s central conflict of interest began popping up. At one point I stumbled upon an interesting puzzle that looked like it could’ve provided insight into the intriguing backstory. But even though I had health to spare, I decided not to solve it in favor of moving on - I was having a good run and it just didn’t seem worth the risk. It’s this kind of dynamic that undercuts the exploration that’s so heavily encouraged; why try something new when you know the safer option will get the same result, risk-free? All roguelikes have these kinds of risk-reward systems, but here the reward lost its appeal. I accomplished the bare minimum before moving on in order to have the highest chance of surviving.

That seems in line with Road’s between-level segments, which emphasize how bleak life is for the residents living outside of the forest. You can talk to all of the downtrodden villagers, exchange gifts for rewards (like banning particularly annoying monsters or pieces from appearing in future levels), and eventually marry someone you’ve made friends with. They often repeat lines like “It doesn’t get any better, does it?” and when you don’t rescue all of the children in a level you’re reminded that you’ve just doomed someone’s child. The bleak story contrasts with the cutesy look in pleasantly unsettling ways, as the caricatures around you get sick, feel emotionally distant, and become jealous of you and each other as you enter into relationships based purely around gift-giving. It was like watching a children’s cartoon go south, which I found fun to watch. Loading

This tale doesn’t have much of a payoff, though, and once I made it to the end, all of it -- the notebook, the villagers, the remaining secrets -- seemed insubstantial. I didn’t really want to go back to unearth the rest of the secrets of the forest; in a goal-oriented environment, there isn’t much of a point to seeing what else you can do after the goal’s been met. Beating Road Not Taken dropped me right back at the start, but playing the earlier levels again wasn’t rewarding since they were now a breeze, and having a starting health cap for every level meant that there wasn’t much point in doing that much better than I had been. The levels being randomized helped alleviate some of that, but they’re actually not as varied as you might think -- only different enough to ensure that the same exact solutions don’t work twice.