I have never encountered a game like Wildermyth. Sure, on the surface it doesn't seem unique. It's a game that describes itself as a party based procedural storytelling RPG with turn based combat. So, fantasy X Com in terms of gameplay in a choose your own adventure story. That doesn't sound like something truly incredible. Something I'd love and buy, but, not one that would quickly become my favorite game.
But the descriptions above do not do it justice. Wildermyth is a character building and myth making game. Each randomly made character feels, not like a random name or even just a bunch of numbered traits, but a real character of their own. But enough about that, let's get into the details.
First off, the graphics while easy to run on my non-gaming laptop, are fantastic. They look like paper cut outs, in a great way. They really come to life in the comic panels that act as cut scenes, and when in the tabletop like battles, where they do look like paper cut outs, and they hop around the board like an invisible hand just picked them up. It's fantastic.
Whoa, guy in the middle must be a red bull addict.
There's no voice acting in this game, but the music, while good, is not great. I'll admit I played part of the game with music off, so, yeah.
Anyway, at launch and the time of this writing, Wildermyth has five story campaigns in it. This does include the generic three and five chapter campaigns, and while I hate to call them story less, they don't have an over arching story. Each of the main story campaigns is themed around a main faction of evil monsters, and dear god, let me talk about the monsters.
I won't spoil anything here, but there are no generic undead, dragons, elves or vampires here. No, instead we have the Gorgons, both serpentine, tentacled undersea creatures and horrifying nature corruption, the Morthagi, ancient clockwork machines that use body parts to create more of themselves, the Deepists, a cult of humans and creatures from deep below ground, the Thrixl, strange dragon/insects from another realm, and the Drauven, a race of earth dragons, that are more like a cross between Dwarves and dragons then pure dragons.
The enemy factions are at the very least different then most other fantasy, and it could've been so easy to just flow into the mold of most fantasy for Wildermyth. I'm so glad they didn't, and each enemy unit is a joy to look at and fight.
But I haven't even talked about the characters yet. Mechanically, a character is just a made up name, a class, which sometimes/usually you get to choose, and a set of numbers ranging from 1 to 100 for a set of personality traits, like Greedy, Leader, Hothead, and Intellectual. But the comic like cut scenes have some characters say things differently depending on the personality traits, and different roles in story and events.
I could continue talking about the mechanics of this, but instead I'll introduce you to Zarnoc, my aloof hothead and my fourth hero I created, counting the first three you make in any adventure. He's appeared in two campaigns, and was always the first to do what needed to be done. In the campaign that focused on the Gorgons, this usually meant going around killing anything that even smelled like corruption. When the other party members held him back from doing so, usually this ended in disaster, so after that they let him have his way. In the second campaign, he was mortally wounded by a boss controlling a Morthagi factory, and instead of being a COWARD and sneaking away to fight another day, he ripped that boss a new one! And, died in the process. I cried a little, it's true, when this happened
This is an example of what kind of character and how attached you can get, in the game of Wildermyth. Also, this is a showcase of taking one character and putting them in another campaign, turning them into a legacy character. Legacy characters are required for some campaigns, and you can recruit legacy characters in campaigns instead of random peasants. Legacy characters are characters who've survived one campaign in the past, and you saved them to become a legacy character to appear as a playable character in another campaign, albeit a younger one so they don't instantly die or retire from old age.
On top of this, characters get into relationships, either on ones you choose, or via the luck of Random Number Generators, or the RNG god. There's rivalry, friendship, and of course, romance. And yes, gay is an option for romance sometimes.
While the storytelling potential of Wildermyth is god damn fantastic, what makes it even better is that if you don't care about storytelling (Get out of my blog, damn you), everything gives a boost to combat in some way. Rivalry, for example, gives a high chance to 'stunt' or critical hit an enemy if your rival critical hits before you do. Pets, which are additions to characters and not separate entities, give some extra damage or defense, and some events can physically transform your character, and you can choose how far the transformation takes and what abilities they get.
While I only played two campaigns of Wildermyth, both story ones, I feel like I got a good handle on the systems and can review it. I was expecting the stories to be bland and generic and just be 'you hero, monsters bad, you kill!' and while this is true of the first one, the second one I played is not that case at all. I won't spoil it, but it actually made me think about a topic that most storytellers make you think is pure evil.
Wildermyth is amazing. I will continue playing it probably until I reach the last of the story campaigns, if not longer. It definitely earned a 5/5 stars from me. It feels less like a video game and more like an storyteller telling you a story, or a tabletop RPG Dungeon Master letting you play with them. In fact, it feels more like a tabletop game to me then most tabletop games converted to video games do.
Anyway, finally finished a review, will have a few more possibly -book- related reviews in the future. Hopefully.
