The heroes of Wildermyth don’t seem to be heroes. At least not initially. They resemble the chattering cast from a 1990s newspaper comic strip, Judge Reinhold captured by a funfair caricaturist, or the cheery helpers I might have once found inside a Usborne kids book that’s trying to teach me about the nitrogen cycle, with their simple felt-pen faces, dots for eyes, and kinked line for a mouth. This seemed a bit strange at first—a little wrong, even. These rickety Dilberts are coming with me on a burning expedition down into the fiery mines of Lord Whatever?
After spending several hours with it, I’m beginning to believe that Wildermyth’s heroes’ visual design is indeed rather brilliant. With an emphasis on randomized story, character development, and character bonding, this is an RPG tactics game that is intricate and maybe somewhat thick. Seek depths, and the earth yields obligingly in all directions. Nonetheless, Wildermyth never seems convoluted. Its layered luminosities never seem to falter in your vicinity. And this is crucial for a player like myself who is tentative, impatient, and perhaps a touch dumb. Riches, wonderful riches, await you in Wildermyth, but only if you stay long enough to discover them. Despite its amazing complexity, it’s easy to pick up and understand even for beginners. Being accessible is something that Wildermyth and his artwork recognize as being important. Something like a Usborne children’s book explaining the nitrogen cycle, you know?
That’s not to disparage Usborne; it’s just more entertaining. To be honest, I think Wildermyth is really more entertaining than almost any game out right now. Over the last year, considerably wiser friends and coworkers have advised me several times to play this. As they proceeded to discuss Wildermyth, I began to feel a little scared. What’s in store? Nothing less than the traditional experience of Dungeons & Dragons. A journey, a group of creepy, nasty monsters in the way, and a party. Turns! Plunder! Decisions! Branches! Proceed with it. However, take note: you have nothing to fear. There’s just happiness and treasure.
I’m going to begin with what seems to be the center of everything at first glance, and what a fantastic center that would make. As a tactical role-playing game, Wildermyth follows in the footsteps of XCOM, using Firaxis’ excellent two-actions-per-turn model and expanding it into magical realms. Even while XCOM was a scary idea on its own, the two-actions business idea was brilliant. Your toy troops should be moved. Proceed now. How are they going to respond? There are two options: move twice without firing, or move once and fire. Each round, you may spend two points. It was hard to ignore the fundamentals of a moveset that both threatened imprisonment and offered mastery, leaving you to rely only on your own tactical deficiencies.
Because of its simplicity, the template well handles the level of ancillary complexity that makes these games really tactical and enjoyable to play. When the time comes for your group to engage in combat in Wildermyth, you’re all dropped into a tiny papercraft grid with folded card cutouts serving as the Mary Blair props—trees, rocks, and elven arches—as well as thickets of flame, repulsive monsters, and even your own team, which consists of heroes who are barely a millimeter thick but brimming with heart. You go about, encountering opponents and assaulting them, and finding foes and being attacked, turn by turn. The majority of the gameplay is manipulating the environment to your advantage via animating rocks, trees, and other natural features. There are classes, melee weapons, ranged weapons, and magic. Sure, you can use an axe to strike someone, but you can also use a blowgun to launch a stone discus from a pile of pebbles or create hot shrapnel out of tree bark to throw at your enemies. You can use a bookshelf to murder someone in Wildermyth, and the thought of doing so makes me happy. And in response, your adversaries may use a bookcase to murder you! And that’s just the element of magic. Users, that’s simply amazing.
Though they take time to become apparent, there are deeper intricacies. Because you may flank opponents to increase your chances of doing damage, placement is crucial. Position is crucial since, by aligning with your friends, you may fortify yourself with a wall for further defense. Consider hiding if you use both of your action points on your second move, which will leave you vulnerable. Consider enemy area-attacks and your own line of sight. There is a certain beast that I detest seeing on the battlefield; it causes an annulus of anguish and leaves the tiles around it a flaming red color that evokes a low-grade, itchy form of grief. Thus, consider target-prioritization as well.
Battle is exhilarating and filled with difficult decisions made at every turn as you move forward across the uneven ground. Despite being paper, it has a real feel to it—or rather, fantasy real, which is arguably even better—with a crunch and impact. It’s also deeply narrative in that strange sense unique to turn-based strategy games. So many unexpected come-to-your-rescue moments, unexpected turns in your destiny determined just by concealed dice rolls and movement ranges. Oh, the things that occur in the papercraft vales and dungeons!
Gain riches, such as new armor, weapons, and trinkets, by surviving combat. You also advance in level. This implies that your party members will be able to choose from a variety of new, practically all-brain-stirring passive and active abilities that are swapped at random. As your health drops, do you want to do more damage? Not an issue. Would you want a spell-caster to be able to call forth discuses of stone, shredded bark, and roots that clutch? You understand. One of my favorite perks is the ability to enter the Wildermyth version of Overwatch at the conclusion of each round, no matter what you did with your action points. empowering. Anyhow, it’s my favorite now. Who knows what the future holds.
These abilities are relevant to the remaining gameplay, which takes place in between encounters. And here is when I feel that Wildermyth has legitimately hurt me.
Chapters comprise a campaign; three for a brief campaign or five for a full-fledged one. You can start with a few scripted campaigns and then combine procedural elements almost indefinitely until the sun erupts. However, the fact remains that procedural elements are included in even the scripted campaigns. Even after playing them repeatedly, they will still seem unique.
For starters, you’ll build distinct characters for your group, so they’ll feel distinctive. In addition to a variety of courses, you get the essentials: bookishness? An excess of greed? Impatience? It was extremely different going into war with a bookish hothead than it was going out with a goofish romantic, believe me. Not only were they distinct from one another in the sense that the bookish hothead was always making up tales and getting into arguments with people, but it was also different in the sense that it forced me to reconsider these felt-pen characters. To be honest, I was astonished to learn that Bode Elderquill—who, at the conclusion of the book, I would have described as a brotherly dreamboat—was really a cowardly greedwagon after fighting through five chapters with him. He began to really exist in that space between how the game and I saw him, and he became readable.
Indeed, your group is important as, as you go through your journey, they will form bonds, have disagreements, grow to be rivals, and fall in love. The next generation comes along, bringing with it new opportunities and problems. However, the narrative is also important, including the major plot points (let’s see what this mothman is up to!) and any procedural bumps along the road.
Consider the Mothman Adventure. Shakespearian in nature, the plot revolves around families, but in between the major events, Wildermyth shuffles the pages and inserts little stories. My main hitting man gets lost in a dale and realizes who he really is! A duplicate! Is he the duplicate, or what? A good concept, but it becomes much better when you have to decide whether to chat or run away. Understand the copy, should you take a chance on it?
Another character tried for a long time to remove a gem from a wall or other object, but it kept exploding and getting stuck in their face. Another became a wolf after answering the wolf god’s summons. I apologize if these seem like spoilers. However, they won’t truly be spoilers since you may not notice these things for hours while playing, and even then, your characters and how you react to things will change.
Consequence and potential are what bind these tales together: the series of “buts” and “therefores” never stops. Like a good DM, Wildermyth knows that important decisions shouldn’t mean the end of the tale; instead, they should lead to an unexpected twist and more. The wildermyth pours.
I haven’t finished yet. The narrative progresses as you traverse a procedural map back and forth, exploring new areas in search of challenging confrontations or townships to defend or develop into factories to provide the necessary revenue to upgrade your equipment. Time is important because Wildermyth presents its tales in terms of days, months, and years as you go from place to place or pause to forge a way across a river or a mountain. Your group is important since splitting off to explore more of the map might lead to vulnerabilities. Because the map is so dynamic, it matters. Just as opposing unit types might get stronger or weaker based on your actions in combat, hostile troops can also swarm, proliferate, and launch invasions on your area. This world is a moving one, as Melville once observed. Although he wasn’t discussing Wildermyth, I believe he would have welcomed a few games. The nerdy romantic.
Here, there is triumph and tragedy as well as true friendship as you get to know your party better, experience more with them, and eventually—and this in and of itself is always a very lovely decision—lose some members in combat. I adore how Wildermyth embraces long stretches of time. It’s not just about the time it takes to build a bridge, which can be challenging if you need to finish a chapter before summer ends. It’s also about the years of peace you earn in between adventure chapters and the opportunity to see what transpires with your players during that time. You have experienced things with these people by the conclusion of a tale, and most importantly, they have changed. They have more years. They have experienced loss and love. Well, some of them are wolves now. A few of them even own animals!
Time is important because Wildermyth presents its tales in terms of days, months, and years as you go from place to place or pause to forge a way across a river or a mountain.
This is not the end at all. The My Legacy screen is my favorite screen in all of Wildermyth. It’s the place where the heroes you’ve led on campaigns—even the fallen ones—go to hang out afterward. You may reintroduce them to fresh ads with fresh options, narratives, and threats. Additionally, you may see their histories and statistics to discover how much they have experienced thus far. Yes, the advantages and talents, but also the campaigns they’ve participated in. the connections they have made. The things that now come to mind as you contemplate them. It need not come to an end. There is no need for the leveling and deepening to stop.
The My Legacy screen is similar to Mii Plaza in several ways. That meticulously accommodating graphic style accomplishes a lot, just like the Miis. Does it not? Observing Chass Hitch, my foolish romantic, my proficient fighter, my forty-three-year-old valiant flirt, I perceive subtleties in the dark specks of his eyes and the gradual graying of his facial hair. Though worn out, he exudes optimism. He has defeated mechanical animals and crab-things. In the woods, he encountered himself and came out of it very well. After that experience, at least that’s what I believe it was—the him-him. Because of its flawless MOR blandness, this visual style is suitable for projection; it serves as the interface between the player and the game, accommodating all of the character’s past actions as well as potential future actions. In the end, it is what makes Wildermyth.