The indie scene has burst with great force in the videogame industry and has allowed that at a time when certain genres in particular, such as action genres and especially the FPS, have a place also for proposals that surely do not have Hollow among the best sellers, but keep their public intact. So, things like platforms or puzzle games have managed to have more output thanks to downloadable
cut titles and small companies that dare to make your imagination fly. It is one of the virtues of indie games: there are no limitations in the form of sales forecasts or huge investments to recover. Free way to the imagination. And that’s where you’ll find Road Not Taken, a Spry Fox puzzle game forPC, PS Vita and PS4.
The title proposal is as simple as addictive after the first minutes of the game. We are an explorer who arrives in a village and whose main mission is to recover the little children who get lost in the forest while they go to look for berries, a matter of first necessity for the subsistence of this village. When the snow and wind fall, the children get lost and the mothers despair.
Our goal is to delve into the dangers of the forest, find the children and return them to their mothers or, failing that, to the mayor, who is at the entrance to the forest.
To achieve this we have a magic stick that allows us to raise any object that is adjacent to us (any of the four sides) and push it with virulence in a straight line until with another obstacle or the limits of each area.
So, if we raise a child from the right side, we will send him in a straight line from where we are to his mother, for example. But this would be to simplify what
Road Not Taken actually offers . We move by boxes and we only have one action button. And we have an energy meter that is spent every time we load with any object. We explain ourselves: we can raise an object and walk with it stuck to our side to put ourselves in a position to throw it where we want. Walking with objects reduces energy.
When it reaches zero, the game ends. Each level represents one year, and the maximum number of years we can play is fifteen. If in the fourth year we make mistakes of movements and we die, we will start from scratch in the first year the next game. As a baby of the genre Roguelike, the dungeons are generated randomly and there will never be a phase equal to the previous one.
The grace of recovering children for mothers is precisely in the large number of obstacles and secrets that we encounter in each phase.
When we arrive at a cabin we will see that besides looking for children, we will need to combine elements of the stage to open the way to the next area. For example, put three pine trees together, six blue stones touching, etc. There are dozens and dozens of objects that we can find on the screen and that have different measures, weights that
make them arrive more or less far when we launch them … an authentic madness. We can find ourselves in areas with four or five stones, as many trees, spirits that take away life if we touch them, birds, raccoons, statues. And in between, mothers and girls. The grace is in knowing how to move and know how to remove the pieces of the puzzle to be able to advance and achieve our goal.
