Road Not Taken from Triple Town dev coming to PS4 and PS Vita

Road Not Taken, the puzzle-roguelike from Triple Town developer Spry Fox, will launch on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita alongside its planned PC release on Steam, the studio revealed today.

The title, which mixes puzzle elements that look somewhat familiar to the object-combining gameplay of Triple Town with staple roguelike features like permadeath, was revealed in a brief teaser trailer this past May. When it was initially revealed, Road Not Taken — the title and, in some ways, the story of which was influenced by the Robert Frost poem of the same name — was targeting a Steam release, with mobile platforms to follow soon after.

Speaking to Polygon shortly before the announcement, Spry Fox's David Edery explained that the game's new destination on Sony's home and portable consoles may delay Road Not Taken's arrival on phones and tablets.

"We still want to do mobile platforms; it will probably take longer," Edery said. "When we first made the announcement, we weren't planning on making it as a mobile game. But Sony saw the trailer and really liked it, they encouraged us to bring it to the PS4 and Vita, so we made a decision that we were going to do that. But if we were going to do that, we were going to go all out, try and make a game that meets the expectations of an average console player, which tend to be higher."

"You can play it for hundreds and hundreds of hours if you want to, and it should be a fairly rewarding experience if we did our jobs right."

Edery said the game may take a bit longer to develop than Spry Fox initially thought. They planned on having Road not Taken out by November or December of this year — now, Edery told us, it's probably going to drop a bit closer to February or March of 2014.

"We're lucky, because as a studio we have enough money coming in from our previous projects that we don't have to ship something to keep ourselves afloat," Edery said. "We're just going to keep working on it until it's done; hopefully that means February, but if we're not really proud of it in February, then it won't be February, it'll be later."

Road Not Taken probably won't achieve the audience of Triple Town, Edery said — partially because it won't be free-to-play when it launches across its three platforms, but also because its systems won't be nearly as transparent as those of Triple Town. While Triple Town's system of stacking three alike items to create a larger object was easy to understand, Road Not Taken frequently changes and breaks its own rules; rules that, in true roguelike fashion, it doesn't always explain.

"This game will never reach as many people," Edery said. "Triple Town reached, I don't even know how many now, 13, 14 million? That's just not going to happen, so the goal's just very different. Instead of reaching a very large number of people, we just want to reach a smaller number who will, hopefully, just really be into the game and want to play. It's a roguelike — you can play it for hundreds and hundreds of hours if you want to, and it should be a fairly rewarding experience if we did our jobs right."