Road Not Taken (2014)

The entire game just boils down to pairing together items to save children. The narrative aspect of Road Not Taken is surprisingly thoughtful for its style of gameplay, but there isn't much to keep players engaged, nor is there any kind of incentive to keep playing after Year 15. On top of this, the game-stopping glitches we encountered should not have been an issue for a game this light on the PS4 hardware. Nevertheless, Road Not Taken is still a solid, if unspectacular puzzler on its own.

But that isn't the problem with the puzzler, however; difficulty in and of itself is not criticism. Though the beasties change – and the increased difficulty with each round will definitely get you thinking – the game itself never does. Its art style, tone and unique gameplay all make for a fascinating experience that you should certainly give a try, but it's hard to ignore the sense of repetition you'll encounter as you play. Randomly generated puzzles results in increased replayability, but it also means a lack of variety – and that forms the ultimate demise of Road Not Taken when it is so clear there is a direction, an end goal, a climax. Original and novel it is, but there just simply isn't enough reward to keep you going against the odds.

Road Not Taken is an insidiously clever randomly generated puzzle game that stumbles sometimes around awkward design.

It's amazing how sometimes the simplest of puzzle ideas can turn chaotically complex. Road Not Taken is definitely one of these games; don't let its cutesy art style fool you in the slightest. Or the raccoons. Pro tip: you see a raccoon, find a way to build a fire and make raccoon soup as fast as you can.

The game's underlying dialogue and storyline is engagingly downbeat and adult.