The road home
When you’re a ranger tasked with rescuing children lost in harsh winter storms, you’ll have to make some very tough decisions about survival.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
These are the last lines of Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken. since we have a science degree and not an english degree, we’re going to loosely interpret the poem to be about making hard choices in life. And that Robert was a cool guy.
Anyway, it’s appropriate then that spry Fox’s Road Not Taken — a rogue-like puzzle game about saving children lost in a forest during a winter storm — is all about making those hard choices in a very short life.
Frosty forest
In Road Not Taken, you play a robed stranger who wanders into a little town bordering a creepy forest. There, you fall into the role of the Ranger, the person tasked with saving the children who go missing in the woods during the harsh winters.
Gameplay-wise, the goal of the game is to rescue as many children as you can from the randomly generated forest-dungeon before you inevitably fail. (We’ll come back to this morbid inevitability soon.)
To reach your goal, you have only one ability: you can magically pick up objects around you, and then throw them in the direction you picked them up. And that’s it.
It sounds like an insultingly simple puzzle-solving mechanic, but oh goodness, it creates such a deep yet easy to comprehend puzzle system.
Game of throws
At first you’ll encounter simple challenges, such as putting two trees together to unlock a door. easy enough, you just need to learn to leverage walls and other objects to get into some good throwing positions.
The only thing you need to learn here is that you have a limited pool of energy that ticks down as you move objects, so you need to plan your moves judiciously. Fortunately, the action is turn-based, so you can take your own sweet time planning.
As you progress, the game gradually introduces new puzzle elements every winter. For instance, you’ll find ice cubes that swap positions with whatever objects they collide into, allowing you to relocate otherwise immovable objects.
More importantly, you’ll eventually discover that objects interact with one another in unique ways. Combine three fire spirits by throwing them together, for example, and you’ll create an axe, which in turn you can throw at trees to create wood, which can then be combined to create a campfire, and so forth.
What happens when you combine fire spirits with light spirits? Nooo, you summoned a creature of pure darkness! You fool, what have you done?
That said, don’t be afraid to experiment and have the occasional (sometimes nightmarish) accident. The game’s a rogue-like, so learning the rules the hard way is part of the experience.
And, besides, discovering the myriads secrets and hidden interactions in Road Not Taken’s fairy tale-like world is one of
the most enjoyable things about the game.
Morbid inevitability
however, Road Not Taken isn’t really about enjoyment. Oh, no, joy isn’t the emotion they’re aiming for, so let’s get back to that morbid inevitability we mentioned.
The goal of the game is to rescue children, but the game follows a rogue-like design philosophy. Mistakes are permanent, there’s only one autosave (so no saving-and-loading), you’ll encounter a lot of unexpected surprises, and there’s no safety net preventing you from accidentally shooting yourself in the foot with stupid mistakes. Do you know what that all means?
It means that there will be times when you, the “hero” of the game, won’t be able to save all the children, and they will die, alone and freezing, in the forest.
If that thought doesn’t make you cringe, then you’re a more stoic gamer than we are.
One time, we raced to rescue two helpless kids from the evil Baba Yaga, a child-eating witch. Unfortunately, with the amount of moves that we had, we realised we could only save one child at best, and we had to choose which.
In technical terms, it didn’t really matter, since a child was just a “point” in the scoring system, but we still tried not to imagine the look on the parents’ faces when we returned to town.
Another time, we pushed hard to rescue every child in the forest, only to drain our energy reserves to single digits.
Because energy carries over between dungeon runs, we couldn’t save anybody when the next (more difficult) winter came. Game Over.
Failures like these made us wonder if we couldn’t have done better if we did things differently, but that regret’s part of not knowing what happens on the roads not taken.
Memento mori
As if that wasn’t enough, the game gives you constant reminders of your own mortality. even if you’re some sort of mythical ranger who manages to save every kid, there’s still a ticking clock. You only have 15 winters as a ranger before your age catches up with you, so the next question becomes: how many can you save in your lifetime?
There are NPCs in the game with whom you can establish relationships with. Ostensibly, this is so you can earn “friendship rewards” like stat-altering charms. But, to be honest, we befriended them — often through several lifetimes/playthroughs — mostly because their musings and dialogue reflected our own increasing existential crisis.
Road Not Taken can be pretty melancholic. Not depressing, mind you, because that would imply the game is completely bereft of hope. We’d say that the game is best described as having strong aspects of mementomori or the Japanese mononoaware, because while we don’t have an english degree we still have Wikipedia.
The game isn’t interested in presenting you with a “happily ever after.” It’s only interested in seeing what you’ve achieved with the decisions you’ve made, because in a way, that’s all that matters.
Now this article has gotten depressing, so let’s switch gears a bit.
Kobayashi maru
As a fun little exercise, we started hacking our game just a teensy bit so we could replay through the many deaths and failures in our previous dungeon runs and see if we could, you know, win. hey, we earned our science degree just so we could Kobayashi Maru our way through video games, okay?
What we learnt was startling: almost every “impossible” dead-end scenario that we got ourselves into previously actually had a perfectly logical solution; we just needed a lot of planning and thinking so far outside the box that we might as well have changed our mental postcode.
Remember Baba Yaga? Instead of trying to race with the witch to reach the children before her, we could have gone back a few rooms to find a wandering parent, then throw said parent into the room to rescue the child in our stead.
hahaha, take that, impossible scenario! We just Captain Kirk-ed it! (In the outwitting way, not the sexy way.) Okay, this is why we loved Road Not
Taken so much: As a puzzle game, it’s a perfect blend of surprise and ingenuity. The game map looks like a cutesy fairy talethemed chessboard, but it’s actually a veritable ecosystem of puzzle pieces that interact very organically with one another. The randomness always keeps the puzzles fresh and challenging, so you always want to come back for more. And there’s always a solution, if you look hard enough.
The mature themes made us sad, especially when we fail, but it added so much emotional weight to the story. When we actually succeeded in our rescues, when we devised some sort of ingenious way to save children in impossibly difficult scenarios, oh man, we felt amazing.
road to redemption
Now we’re faced with our own difficult decision: do we recommend that you play
Road Not Taken, because it’s an engrossing puzzle game and a beautiful fairy tale with incredibly mature sensibilities?
Or do we tell you to avoid spry Fox’s game, because the rogue-like challenge can prove too difficult for many players, and the melancholic story can make all but the most stoic gamer question the meaning of life?
Just kidding, this is an easy one: take the Road Not Taken.
Pros: Cutesy art with mature themes; refreshing new puzzles on every run.
Cons: Rogue-like level of difficulty may turn off more casual players; so much melancholy.