Windy Meadow, out now, is a delightful smalltown fable from the world of Roadwarden

rockpapershotgun.com:

If you played a videogame at all in 2022, I hope it was Roadwarden. A blend of RPG and visual novel from Polish developer Moral Anxiety, it cast you as lonesome wayfarer maintaining the paths and investigating the mysteries or grievances of a thinly populated wilderness setting. It was a game of immense feeling, craft and cleverness, inspired by table-top games, which puts some of the hoarier ideas of videogame role-playing through the wringer. In the world of Roadwarden, there's no grinding for XP. Knowledge, empathy and insight are worth far more than material wealth or wielding the shiniest axe. Quests can hinge on something as minute as your ear for dialects or knowing the correct form of address. And each village along the trail is a world in itself.

Moral Anxiety's Windy Meadow - which actually dates back to before development of Roadwarden, but has been substantially remastered since the latter's release - essentially narrows the focus to one of those villages. Out today, it's a quietly gorgeous visual novel in which you follow several characters in different timeframes, building up a layered understanding of one and the same setting, with scene transitions plotted on a beautiful pixelart map screen.

I've played through two chapters - one stars a young huntress who is weighing up whether to travel to the big city, while another is the story of a disabled man who is training to be a bard - and am having a wonderful time. The absence of Roadwarden's RPG elements is deflating at first, but Windy Meadow's execution of certain visual novel staples is similarly deft. Each character gets their own version of the codex, for instance, which can be accessed using rollover tool-tips for highlighted text in dialogue.