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Road Not Taken is a hell of a game to sum up in one snappy introduction. Even now, a week removed from the two hours I spent unwrapping layer after layer, I’m not sure I could justifiably say it fits neatly into the outdated genres by which we still categorize. But that’s OK, you see, because as I learned while speaking to Daniel Cook and David Edery – cofounders of independent development outfit Spry Fox – they don’t particularly know who the game’s for and it doesn’t bother them at all.“I really don’t know who the demographic would be,” Daniel Cook said when asked who they’re targeting with Road Not Taken. Cook, in addition to cofounding Spry Fox, serves as its creative director and designer on most games the Seattle-based studio churns out. The studio is quickly building a résumé full of indie hits the likes of Triple Town, Steam Birds, and Realm of the Mad God. His efforts on their most recent offering include design and writing, drawing from deeply personal elements and hardships of his own life to fuel an experience that not only resonates with players but also affords him the chance to get it all out in the open.

“It’s definitely us,” David Edery jumped in. As CEO of the dozen-person development house, Edery shares the other half of the co-founder moniker. “People who like hard puzzles, that’s for sure.” He’s not wrong: Road Not Taken forced me to stop and consider on a number of occasions. When I started to get comfortable – confident in my abilities to find the reward at the end of the maze, Road Not Taken added a new mechanic. This happened half a dozen times by the end of the first level – an indication of the sheer depth and variety waiting further along.
Road Not Taken BlizzardWhen I asked Cook to give me the Road Not Taken elevator pitch – the bare essentials of the game in as few words as possible – his description was in itself a puzzling thing. “It’s an open-world puzzle roguelike based off a poem by Robert Frost,” he said with a smile, fully aware of how it sounds when said aloud. But that’s exactly what Road Not Taken is. A puzzle game populated almost entirely by procedurally generated rooms where you pick up objects in every direction around your character all at once and fling them into related objects. If you’re good, you’ll complete objectives and fulfill a haunting, fairytale narrative about life, death, love, hard choices, and making the best of the hand you’re dealt. If you’re bad, you’ll die immediately.

“Sorry, I forgot the dating sim,” Cook corrected, “don’t forget the dating sim.” It also has a dating sim.
A fragile new purposeYou begin Road Not Taken washed up on the shores of a village. As the newest member of the tiny society, you’re quickly tasked with earning your keep by setting out into the surrounding woods and rescuing lost children – but there’s a catch. Each successful foray in to the wild costs you one year of your life, and after 15 years, you will die. “Because it’s a roguelike, most players will not make it all the way through 15 years without dying,” Cook said of the system. “But you’ve got 15 years to build relationships that you want, to try to get your life as best as possible.”
This idea of living the best possible life stems directly from the game’s namesake, “The Road Not Taken,” one of the more famous works by American poet Robert Frost. “One interpretation tends to be like: sometimes you have to pick a path in life and live with it. And then looking back on it you ironically congratulate yourself on picking the best path possible,” Cook explains. “But there’s also this like standard narrative of how you should live your life. This idea of: You go to school, you get a good job, fall in love, get married, and then have kids. That’s the arc of life and everyone should follow it. But life usually doesn’t work out that way. Not for everybody. And as you’ll go through you’ll start to see these multiple layers and we start bringing in that theme again and again. How do you live the best possible life in the time that you have and what decisions do you make?”