Warden: a (bug)folk horror

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.