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"Every winter we lose a few," says the mayor, matter-of-factly. Bereavement is the cost of living in a remote village where once a year a winter storm sweeps the children from their beds and deposits them somewhere in the vastness of the bordering forest. Your job, as the newly hired ranger, is to lower this annual death toll, to make the "few" fewer still. On the morning after each year's storm you crunch into the forest's shifting clearings. There you search behind rocks, trees and wolves for the lost children whom you must deliver safely back to their pacing mothers. Your contract lasts for 15 years. You must rescue at least half of the children after each storm in order to progress to the next year. But, as the mayor advises, if you choose to leave the forest before you've found every last child, try not to look the parents in the eye on your way back home.
It's an emotive premise, and one that injects Road Not Taken's brilliant yet convoluted mechanics with urgency and soul. Fittingly for a game that's about combining different things to create novelties, developer Spry Fox has combined the match-three genre with a rogue-like to create a game that is both idiosyncratic and unfamiliar and the story helps to ground its curiosities with a clear goal. The forest is divided into a series of linked, randomly generated areas that house animals, objects and the absent children. You are able to move freely around the gridded environments; each time you move any other creatures in the vicinity take their move in kind. Otherwise, your interactions are limited to lifting, carrying and throwing.
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