warden: a (bug)folk horror

A world where a wooden log becomes an impassable barrier. The stump of a tree a house for three families. A small corner of a field a land in need of patrolling wardens.

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids completely mesmerised me when I was but a wee boy and saw it on the big screen. Later, when I saw The Borrowers on television, I felt that same magic again, this time enhanced by a more fine-tuned critical eye (I think I was 17 when I first saw it) befitting a more nuanced and layered film. And of course The Bromeliad by Terry Pratchett gave me many hours of enchanted reading pleasure.

I love how stories about little folk view the whole world that I think I know so well from a completely different, yet oh so familiar perspective. A new and fresh and surprising take on all the banalities and for-granteds of everyday life.

Warden fits right in with these stories, and it’s a lot closer to The Bromeliad end of the spectrum than it is to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids !
We follow the protagonist after she comes back from a surveillance mission. Rumours about some kind of intruder at the edge of the field create a lingering background tension, even as our protagonist’s immediate focus is food. She’s starved after such a long and exhausting mission.

What follows is almost a slice-of-life episode. Engage in a bit of banter with the neighbours while also asking about more pressing matters, look for some truly filling food (more than those few measly pickles), go admire the sap-reducing kiln made out of a flowerpot "borrowed from the big-uns,…

Practically a leisurely day out and about… But always, everywhere, the unshakable feeling that something is off…

Until you find the first hard evidence that something is very much off indeed…

During your investigation into the causes of this disturbance in your normally calm and peaceful corner of the field (except for the occasional wasp or badger, but your people have their ways to get rid of those…), there are obstacles to get around or across or over. Mostly in a typical text-adventure manner, but always with that bit of extra imaginative giddiness of being a miniature bugfolk in a world of giant pumpkins and huge looming berry-bushes.

The story slowly unfolds, and it’s a pleasure to keep guessing about the nature of the threat that is creeping up between the lines of the narrative as much as it is showing itself more and more in bits and pieces of evidence around your corner of the field.

I loved this game.

This was a great game! Both cute and genuinely creepy, with the two facets playing off of each other.

It’s a parser game where you play as a bug, and everyone else around you is a bug in a bug society with jobs, writing, culture, etc. While bug-based media has existed for decades, I pictured everything in the Hollow Knight art style as that’s the bug-based media I’ve seen the most of recently.

Unusually for a parser game, it has multiple paths to progress the story and a variety of achievements. However, it keeps the classic parser game play loop of exploration, grabbing items, and solving puzzles.

You’ve come back from a long trip and you’re just starving. Strangely, some of your fellow bugs are missing. Your goals are to sate your hunger and investigate the disappearances.

I had a lot of fun with this game, and it does get disturbingly creepy later on (more so because the horrors exist in real life).

This game overall reminded me a lot of Slouching Towards Bedlam, both because of the multiple paths and because of the overall plot.

There are three other bug-related games I'll discuss here: Hollow Knight, its sequel Silksong, and the more obscure game called Bug Fables. All three are fantasy games with a sword-and-sorcery feel, and they all take place in kingdoms entirely filled with bugs. I've played the first two for many hours, and though I haven't played Bug Fables, I've heard a fair amount about it.

(It was probably inevitable that I'd play this game at some point, given the sheer amount of time I've spent on Hollow Knight.)

In the Warden postmortem, the devs say they weren't explicitly taking inspiration from Hollow Knight while creating this game. And there are marked differences. Hollow Knight and Silksong have an aesthetic of decay and isolation. You explore abandoned cities overrun by zombies; both games take place in a vaguely defined underground. When it comes to the setting, I find more similarity between Warden and Bug Fables, which have actually functioning societies with populated towns and villages, under tanna carnhe sunlight and open sky. A lot of Warden consists of exploring the village you live in, talking to people, getting to know them and see their lives. It's more slice-of-life than the hack-and-slash gameplay of HK or Silksong. Even Bug Fables, being a Paper Mario-inspired RPG, has more of a combat focus than this game.

Also of note is that humans vaguely exist in the world of Warden, as they do in the world of Bug Fables, while Hollow Knight and Silksong have their own esoteric bug cosmology where humans never get mentioned. When it comes to the sense that you're a small, insignificant creature in a world inhabited by strange and fearful giants, Warden nails that feeling in its story and setting a lot more than Hollow Knight and Silksong, where the main characters explicitly have divine power and are a step above the common folk. The plots of Hollow Knight and Silksong involve achieving godhood; here, you're just a normal person trying to survive.

There still are a few similarities to Hollow Knight and Silksong, though. Some small environmental details I found fun, like riding stag beetles and using needles as weapons. And some other things too, including one particular Silksong quest, which I'll get to in the spoiler section.

It's a charming setting, and a lot of the game's appeal lies in exploring it. This is both the game's strength and weakness. I like the setting, but the overwhelming amount of stuff to see and do and look at in some rooms can be a bit much. I had a hard time finding the key needed to proceed to the ending since there was so much to examine, and even just leaving the protagoinst's room at the start after looking at everything in it took, what, ten minutes? More? It was fun, but some pacing of how much stuff you can examine in each room might've been nice.

Discussing the story beyond this will involve some spoilers, since the central conflict of the story is kept under wraps. It's a good one, though.