You play as a huge customizable machine in mission-based gameplay with an anime storyline.

I didn't know Fromsoft made Ace Combat games!

For real tho, this game rules. Big recommend.

With the exception of a couple side quests and one or two mild twists, the plot is only slightly more than sufficient to justify fighting more and more monsters. Which is honestly all it needed to do because fighting big monsters is so great in this game.

Shoutout to David Lodge for carrying Grigori and making him appropriately awe inspiring.

The vocations are varied, interesting, and fun to build. Climbing monsters to stab specific weak points sounds mundane, but the implementation here is inspired.

The pawn system is simultaneously hilarious and awesome. Thought I would hate it, but they're just so endearing.
Also in case you didn't know, goblins are weak to fire.

All in all, a decent fantasy world with wonderful monster slashing.

Haven't done Bitterblack yet, will update.

I think in a way I played this game at the perfect moment in my life. As I tried to become a better DM in our weekly tabletop RPG campaign I was thinking about fictional worlds, the structure of stories, and how characters interact with each other and the player a lot lately.
Then I played Roadwarden. A game that would best be described as a chimaera with the head of a visual novel, the body of an RPG, and the legs of a text adventure. In the beginning, the game lulled me with its beautifully atmospheric pixel art and its equally fitting melancholic music. But it wasn't long before I was fascinated by its world. A rough world, where survival isn't a given and death lurks around every corner. Where every little hamlet, every path through this land had to be painfully carved out of the wilderness and relentlessly protected against the wild beasts (one of which is humanity itself).
But the aspect that really made me fall in love with this game was how it handled the player's involvement in this world and the web of relationships the player has to navigate. I never felt railroaded, always in control. There was no clear direction to take, not even a clear goal. And so it felt more like a real world, like a real life I was living. I was trying to improve things, yes. But ultimately I was just a small cog in this machine that will keep on running long after I finished the game. Every decision I made was mine. Every path I took belonged to me. Every friendship I made along the way was personal. In the end, there isn't the best way to play this game. Not the right decision to make. Not the correct path to take. Every player's story will differ, no outcome will be the same. It was my story and my story alone. Never has a story in a game felt so personal to me.

if i were a theatrical murderer who left threatening notes and ticking time bombs and shit in a world where it is considered annoying but not unusual for your coworkers to bar your entrance to rooms that you need access to for your job by making you answer three riddles, i would simply not make my calling card alias an anagram of my real name. (i also probably would not embark on lengthy extremely venomous rants against the guy i was trying to murder with literally no prompting to every single person i spoke to but mostly the puzzle thing). it is however, goofy little bits like the riddles and and killer using a saw voice modulator to say "hello rick, don't try to run away from my bomb please, just let it blow you up that would be really sick for me" that save this game from being a complete waste of time. well, that and the fact that the time wasted amounted to about two hours on the normal difficulty.

while this is still recognizably the funny, semi-laytonesque universe of Secrets Can Kill, all the verve of that game is missing here in favor of a plot that feels a lot more limp and meandering, despite the fact that there are 100% more klieg-light-attempted-murders, literal timebombs, strangulations, and sonic the hedgehog voice actors present (robbie daymond doing an incredible in-universe actor-who-sucks-at-acting performance here in one of his earliest acting credits).

all of these characters are funny or interesting on paper but shallow and boring in game, except for the killer, whose character is entirely carried by a truly unhinged performance by his voice actor, which is entertaining but does lead to the problem of making it easy to finger him as the villain within the first conversation you have with him, which somehow makes a game that could easily wrap in less than two hours feel like it drags longer than it already does. the fact that a lot of this runtime is spent setting up an incredibly unconvincing red herring does not help.

there are very few puzzles in the game and inexplicably almost all of them revolve around trying to figure out how to open up various doors, and when you're not doing that you're usually trying to figure out how to open various doors at night time. that's right, this game has a day night cycle, which affects very little except certain puzzle solutions, and mostly serves to add another layer of tedium; just slapping another set of screens to click through when you realize you know where you need to go but you've hit an arbitrary wall in your progression. this system is emblematic of this game as a whole when you compare it to the first one: simultaneously more ambitious in ideas but unwilling or, more likely, unable to actually follow through with any of the interesting ideas. surely this has less to do with a lack of interest or talent on the dev team's part and more to do with the fact that these things got cranked out twice a year and as far as i am aware never really turned a profit. that's pressure and i understand wanting to try new things but not really being able to achieve what you wanted to with extremely limited time and resources, and ending up with something neutered and unsatisfying.

two final notes that don't fit anywhere else: first, the final puzzle in this game is criminal: a strictly timed, completely randomized, eight part puzzle that resets itself upon failure and results in a game over as the last challenge of your game with no warning or prep time fuckin sucks dude what the hell. Nancy's neck must be sore because she got strangled to death literally four times before i finished the game by complete luck.

Second, where character models in the first game were the very loose bluthy 2d american animation that you see a lot in that mid period of pc adventure games before 3d had taken over but after crude pixel art was considered acceptable, this one moves on to full 3D models for every character and they're hideous and i love them. their torsos are completely still, their mouths GROSSLY overanimate when they talk and to compensate for not being able to move the centers of their bodies their heads and arms gesticulate wildly. ALSO there are PHOTOS EVERYWHERE and for some godforsaken reason HeR thought the move here was to either photoshop a 1999 CG guy into a picture with real dudes or edit 1999 CG dude heads and hands onto real people and both of these look extremely fucked up, it's incredible.

So yeah, the game is obviously an aesthetic joy, Lani Minella still has a bunch of awkward as hell line reads but she's clearly a lot more comfortable as Nancy, the audio quality is all around better and the supporting cast's performances are, for the most part, actually good, unlike the previous game. However, as a story and as an experience this is basically nothing at all, an often irritating and always tedious (and at one point super racist, I KNOW that dude was not voiced by a real indian guy) chore that only kept me on the hook with semi-regular doses of that Nancy Drew CyberAdventure Series absurdity that i love so much. Just uh, not enough to save it. Game sucks shit.

PREVIOUSLY: SECRETS CAN KILL
NEXT TIME: MESSAGE IN A HAUNTED MANSION

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES