You begin Road Not Taken washed up on the shores of a village. “Sorry, I forgot the dating sim,” Cook corrected, “don’t forget the dating sim.” It also has a dating sim. 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.
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. But that’s exactly what Road Not Taken is. “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. When 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. This happened half a dozen times by the end of the first level – an indication of the sheer depth and variety waiting further along. 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. “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. As CEO of the dozen-person development house, Edery shares the other half of the co-founder moniker. “It’s definitely us,” David Edery jumped in. 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.
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The studio is quickly building a résumé full of indie hits the likes of Triple Town, Steam Birds, and Realm of the Mad God. Cook, in addition to cofounding Spry Fox, serves as its creative director and designer on most games the Seattle-based studio churns out.
“I really don’t know who the demographic would be,” Daniel Cook said when asked who they’re targeting with Road Not Taken. 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. 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. Road Not Taken is a hell of a game to sum up in one snappy introduction.
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