This game’s description didn’t quite make it clear to me, but it’s really a very old-school style text adventure game accompanied by still images. There are no real combat mechanics for example. They’re just skill checks to see if you can get past obstacles. There are things like RPG stats, inventory items and so on, but it’s all very simple. I was turned off by how much reading this entailed at first even though I used to be a big fan of gamebooks. But I came around as I grew to know its world and ended up enjoying myself quite a bit.

The setting is an original fantasy world where what passes for civilization is centered around the Ten Cities. In the wake of an invasion, contact between the cities and the hinterland becomes tenuous. The player is a Roadwarden, hired by the merchants of the city of Hovlavan to travel to an isolated peninsular to reestablish contact with the settlements there and investigate the viability of trade. You are also to determine what happened to the previous Roadwarden, Asterion, who had fallen out of contact. The player arrives to discover that life in the peninsular is tough with the roads in poor condition and the settlements having only limited contact with one another. The night is perilous as animals, monsters and even animated corpses attack those without shelter. Soon after your arrival, you discover evidence of an active band of bandits and a village that has been completely destroyed. You are given a limited number of days to complete your mission before you must return to Hovlavan to deliver your report.

This really is an entirely text driven game with the graphics being merely static illustrations for the locations you can visit. The game even deliberately avoids illustrating the characters and creatures you can encounter, so you must rely on the descriptions in the text. You better believe that the game doesn’t hesitate to dump screenfuls of text at you, especially when you visit a settlement for the first time or the characters talk about the past. It’s still a proper RPG with stats that track your current health, armor, inventory, even your hunger and cleanliness levels. There are three character classes to choose from and while the game avoids explicitly having ability stats or levelling, winning in combat does make you better in subsequent fights. There are quests to do, time passes as you travel around the map, talk to people and rest, and there’s a journal that helps you keep track of everything.

Even for someone who reads as much as I do, this was rather daunting to play what with the original setting with its own rich history, religions, magic and so on. It’s a very cleverly conceived world however and the backstory does matter so once I managed to get myself oriented, I found myself very engaged in what’s going on and determined to learn about the secrets of the land. The writing is consistently good and the quests both long and meaningful. Sure, there are the occasional fetch quests to get you moving to new places and perhaps help you make some money early, But the important ones are complex and quite involved, with many steps and multiple possible endings. In line with the best RPGs, you’ll be asked to uncover past crimes and choose sides. Ostensibly, you’re working for the merchants of one of the Ten Cities, yet in the end, it’s still up to the player decide what your real objective is.

This game kind of intimidated me at first as many of the early text options suggest that the world is hostile and full of dangers. I think the developers must have been deliberately messing with the player because the peninsular really isn’t that dangerous. Similarly, you may feel pressure about finding food and securing a safe place to sleep at night when you start out with little money, but you can usually get some money for nearly every quest and becoming friends with everyone will drop their prices by a lot or sometimes make things free. The 40-day time limit at normal difficulty is also quite doable. Even if you can’t quite manage to do everything, just realize that you don’t need to in order to get a relatively good result.

I started out being kind of lukewarm to this due to its lackluster presentation and the daunting amount of text to read but towards the end, I liked it so much I was checking to see if it had any DLC. Unfortunately there is not. If the aspects of RPGs that matter to you the most are the quests, characters and many possible outcomes, I would really recommend this. It’s a very natural and satisfying extension of the gamebooks of yore.