Road not Taken is a surprisingly ambitious match-three game that casts you as a woodland ranger recently employed in a remote village. Your job is to watch over the village children when they venture into the surrounding forests, ensuring they return home safely. Your contract runs for 15 years, with every year representing a level. Over time, you form relationships with various people in the village, depending on how you interact with them and how you fare when rescuing children.
Although the game runs over a set amount of time, each level is procedurally generated, so if you fail, the levels will be different the second time around.
Your basic objective is to return the children either to the town mayor, or to one of the mothers dotted around the wood. However, to achieve this goal, you need to navigate or move around many other objects on the map. It’s like Bejeweled, but with children dying of hypothermia.
Objects are manipulated by picking them up and either carrying or throwing them. They can only be thrown in the direction from which you initially approached them, but carrying objects costs a unit of energy. Running out of energy results in death, meaning you need to move carefully, or make difficult decisions about who to save and who to leave behind.
Alongside this basic objective are the hundreds of secrets, bonuses and hazards revealed by matching different items. Matching two logs will create fire, which stops you losing energy when carrying objects. However, matching eerie woodland spirits with a bunny creates a demon bunny that eats all the other animals in that area, which (in case you hadn’t guessed) you don’t want to happen.
It all amounts to a fascinating and unique game, but this isn’t always the case. The idea is that you’re encouraged to live with your decisions, but often it feels like the game is forcing you into impossible situations. The difficulty ramps up extremely quickly, and information isn’t always forthcoming. It was unclear how to use power-ups for a while, for example. Whether the difficulty is deliberate, or simply a consequence of the amount happening in the game is unclear.
However, the visual design is lovely, brilliantly evoking the game’s European folklore inspirations, and juxtaposing the brutal realities you face while playing. It’s also supremely well written, which is a remarkable way to describe a matchthree game. Character interactions are brief yet brimming with personality and detail about the world. It might be a bumpy ride at times, but overall, we’re pleased we took the road that led to Road not Taken. RICK LANE
VERDICT
Ambitious and skilfully crafted, Road Not Taken is a fascinating if not always enjoyable experience.