Go to the game's main page
Review
A worldbuilding-heavy game with some nice horror
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 absorbed a fair amount of info 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. Also, I like bugs. You can tell by my username.)
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.
(Spoiler - click to show)SPOILERS
One more thing I’ll talk about in comparing the four games: parasites.
Bugs are known in part for their proximity to awful parasitic lifeforms that will destroy a bug’s life in the way they could never do to a human. Cordyceps, the stuff of horror stories like The Last of Us, is a big one. The zombie fungi that overrides a bug’s will and forces them to die in the service of infecting their brethren - I mean, how horrific is that?
Hollow Knight, Silksong, Bug Fables and this game all have sections featuring parasite-induced mind control. In Hollow Knight, the “orange light” plague that infects bugs and turns them against their brethren is fundamentally parasitic, and takes on a fungal appearance in later parts of the game as it spreads and grows. Silksong has more of a spider-puppeteer aesthetic, control by pulling people’s strings, but the Lifeblood sideplot definitely has an invasive alien parasite thing going on. Bug Fables has a sideplot where one of the main characters is actually revealed to be a cordyceps parasite puppeteering the dead body of their “true self”, a bug who died years ago. It’s a horrifying reveal for the character himself, who thinks he’s normal and then learns he’s actually a zombie lifeform inhabiting a dead shell.
As for Silksong, there’s a particular sidequest I was reminded of while I played Warden. Spoilers for Silksong, if anyone cares:
(Spoiler - click to show)https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cursed_Crest
In Silksong, there’s an item called the Twisted Bud you can get in a late-game area. You find it in a cradle-shaped flower, can’t get rid of it once you pick it up, and it makes a constant crying sound whenever you open your inventory. If you bring it to an NPC named Greyroot, she unexpectedly attacks you, implanting the bud into you as a parasitic lifeform that she will use to “rebirth” herself. The parasite’s infection weakens you, sharply limiting your health and removing your ability to use many skills. Getting rid of it requires you to do a series of fetch quests that ends up taking you to a shady doctor who was exiled from the town for her unethical behavior, and the process for removing it is described as experimental and deeply painful. The item you get after removing it is called the Witch Crest.
I liked the quest, given my pre-existing interest in parasites, but didn’t think much more of it until a Youtuber mentioned offhandedly, in some speedrun video I was watching, that the questline could be viewed as an analogy for abortion after assault. I thought about it afterwards, and I can see it. Silksong has a fair amount of veiled commentary on real-world issues, and a lot of the game can be interpreted as a criticism of corrupt organized religion: the central plot revolves around pilgrims journeying to a holy citadel, and when you enter the citadel, you learn it’s maintained by the labor of overworked, underpaid bugs who are exploited by those above them in the religious hierarchy. The citadel also imprisons and tortures heretics.
Of course, the analogy isn’t 1:1, and it’s impossible to say with certainty whether the Silksong developers intended that specific reading, just as it’s impossible to say with certainty whether the central conflict in Warden was intended to represent anything or whether it was just supposed to be a creepy thing. I do think it’s relatively common to draw the line between “alien parasitism” stories and forced birth. The Xenomorphs from Alien, one of the ur-examples for alien parasitism, have an explicitly intended symbolic connection to the topic. (There’s an article about it here, though it goes over some really graphic examples.) But maybe the devs of Warden didn’t intend any analogy of this nature at all and would even be horrified by the notion. I can only apologize to them in this case and say that it’s what I noticed.
Regardless of the possible metaphor, there’s a more generalized reading where the attack can be seen as a nonspecific traumatic event, a horrific thing that happened to the protagonist and momentarily makes them into a paranoid, ravening monster. The multiple endings are how the protagonist/player responds to that: you can lean into the paranoia and let it kill you, even take someone else with you if you choose, or you can focus on recovery and listen to the doctor who has the medicine and can help you get better.
It’s not a binary choice, and there’s another ending where you fuse with the parasite, having become so affected by it that you can no stand to see it die. Perhaps the real-world equivalent is becoming so attached to your own paranoia and isolation that you can’t imagine curing yourself of it, even as it hurts you. If you don’t get medicine from the doctor, this is the best option you have: to live with this creature forever, dealing with its paranoid whims. But you can still spare the parasite even if you do have the medicine, and the doctor can kill it and remove it forever.
I’m fond of this “fuse” option on a literal level. I like the idea of looking at a monster born from horrific violence that wants nothing more than to kill and use you, and feeling tenderness for it. The unnecessary mercy of letting it live within you even when you know it could ruin your life, and you’ll never be the same afterwards, just because you can’t bear to kill it. The protagonist doesn’t even get anything positive out of sparing the parasite; this isn’t Undertale, the results for them compared to the ending where they kill it are worse in pretty much every way. With the parasite fused, they can’t stand large crowds, they deal with paranoid urges, they eat differently, they have to wear a cloak to cover their permanently distended abdomen. But I like this ending nonetheless, maybe due to the totality of its self-sacrificing kindness, maybe because I like the idea of having a traumatic event leave a mark on you that makes you a permanently changed person, forced out of society to some degree, even as your friends pity and comfort you but can never truly understand.
Or maybe it’s just my fondness for parasites coming through. Some part of me finds myself sympathetic to the monster and its monstrous impulses. Even in the ending where it kills you, there’s a macabre loveliness to it, the protagonist being so consumed by their implanted love that they are ardently devoted to what destroys them.
One final thing. Parasitoid wasps exist in real life and many have a lifecycle that involves implanting an egg inside another bug, which will eventually hatch and burst out of the other bug’s body, killing them in the process. Some parasitoid wasps change the behavior of the host bug that gets an egg laid inside them, forcing them to care for the wasp babies afterwards. Many cordyceps species, and really many species in general, also have the same pattern of implanting a death drive or abnormal behavioral patterns to help the parasite reproduce. One cordyceps species makes ants crawl up to a really high area and stay there while the fruiting bodies bloom out of their body, to spread the spores further. One parasitic flatworm makes snails present themselves to birds (and makes their eyestalks look like pulsating caterpillars so they’re more appetizing) so it can spread to the birds.
This means the main situation that afflicts the protagonist is biologically grounded. Isn’t nature beautiful.
