Road Not Taken
Review
Dark story in a light, fairy tale fashion
by Matt Porter
reviewed on PC
Lots of combinations (cntd)
The difficulty comes in combining objects together in as few moves as possible, so you don’t run out of energy before finding all the children. Each year has a certain number of kids to find. You don’t have to find them all, but fail to find half of them twice in a career (which spans 15 years), and you will have failed your mission and have a similar fate to dying.
I haven’t even got into what happens if you combine certain objects together. Remember what I said about a surprising amount of depth? There are 200 combos to find, and the game won’t tell you any of them, you will have to experiment. Here are some basic examples. Chuck a piece of wood into another piece of wood and you will make a fire. Throw three beehives together and you will get honey. But if you pick up a beehive, a bee will fly out and sting you, reducing your energy. Pick up the bee and throw it, and it will become scared. It will flee from you as you approach a square at a time. If you pick a scared bee up it will sting you. But, if you combine three scared bees together you will get royal honey, which is even better than the normal stuff. You can see how things start to get a little out of hand.
Puzzles
Sometimes you throw an object and something completely unexpected happens. All the combos get added to your notebook to look at any time, but you will come to remember the most important ones. During the course of one career I only found just over a hundred, so there’s still plenty of content to be found after one playthrough. There is also a certain sense of humour to the combos. Some kids don’t want to follow you back through the forest. However, throw them into a fire and they will become “precocious” and stay a step behind you at all times.
Most of the fun is finding these different combinations. The puzzles themselves are hard, especially given the random nature of the arrangements. In one year which was supposed to be “difficult”, all of the children were easily accessible and near the entrance. The next year it was nigh on impossible to get even one kid without losing a whole bunch of energy. These spikes in difficulty are a little disappointing, and it begs the question as to whether the game would be any worse off with puzzles that were actually designed, rather than being random. Other annoyances are little interface things like dialogue boxes coming up over important information, and you have to wait for them to go away.
Good but tough
Overall, Road Not Taken is a good little title. The puzzles can be harsh, but they are always solvable. The visuals and the way the various combinations are designed are truly delightful, but it’s let down by some annoying UI stuff. Each new year has you finding new things which never fail to bring a smile to your face. However the level of obscurity you face is sometimes frustrating. It’s not perfect by any means, but it is certainly refreshing.
7.0
fun score
Pros
Oozing with charm, decent original puzzle mechanics.
Cons
Random spikes in difficulty, some poor user interface design choices.
