2024 seems to be the year that a bunch of smaller developers have taken the jump and released content on the Xbox Series X. Wildermyth is another to come to Microsoft’s black monolith after an extended period of early access on Steam dating back to 2021. It was originally brought to my attention by some early buzz about how the game procedurally generated a roleplaying campaign. It sounded really enticing but I wondered how it would work. How would stories feel meaningful if it was reliant on a random number generator? How would events line up when they are being pulled from a pool? How could the writing be good enough to sustain extended play?
Well, on my second playthrough I sat through a vignette about an immortal cat and its spirit owner, and the humour and pathos were balanced on a knifes edge. I am feeling things, but I am almost laughing a little.
Wildermyth is a 2D RPG, with turn-based tactical combat. It takes the roleplaying part of the game very seriously, with every choice and outcome of combat tying into how a story will unravel. The player starts off with 3 party members – a mystic, a hunter, and a warrior. The player can customise most aspects of these little cartoon characters – their names, their shape and sizes, their traits (are they cowardly, creative, snarky, or all of the above?), who they can be romantically involved with and so on.
Over the course of a campaign, the party will grow in size, characters will fall in love, develop rivalries, get maimed and have to replace their limbs, meet ancient gods, and even die. This is supported by vignettes that do a great job of communicating a moving story, of relationships developing and history passing, it is a feat that requires consistently good writing, and the developers Worldwalker Games deliver.
All of this would not mean much if the accompanying gameplay wasn’t up to snuff and Wildermyth has a solid base. The overworld is traversed first, with characters being able to split up and patrol areas, build up and gather resources, and then initiate fights. As they move, craft or build, days will tick down, and there are two countdowns to worry about. The first counter leads to the world getting harder with the enemies being added and made tougher. The other counter is an incursion, which spawns a rampaging group that destroy resources and requires the team to fight them off to stop their warpath.
The combat itself is on proc-gen fighting spots on a square grid. Each character gets 2 action points to use on what they want. This can be in any turn order, which leads to a plurality of tactics. Each of the three classes has a huge set of skills to chose from on each level up. The warrior class can get abilities that make them able to lock down areas with defense, the hunter can become a really effective long-range character or mix it up with a crossbow/melee combination, and the mystic leans into their interfusion powers which allows them to do all kinds of crazy stuff by possessing inanimate objects. The mystic feels like a real departure from traditional magic wielders and became the most interesting of the classes to me.
Over the course of 4-5 hours I experienced an engrossing roleplaying campaign, with great combat, whereby I felt like my characters had gone through something. Even better, I was sharing this experience with 1-2 people, making choices together and talking through strategies on the battlefield.
What seemed really enticing was that I was going to be able to take these characters (classified as Legacy heroes) into new campaigns. Sadly, it wasn’t quite how I imagined it. The player will have to pick some subset of skills in this Legacy hero (instead of a fully powered one) and the relationships built in previous campaigns get erased. I was sad when Flamalla, the snippy hunter, and Timothy, the fresh-faced warrior, no longer recognised each other after their romance in a previous campaign. I understand that this would be a very hard thing to maintain while offering such variety to the narratives, I just wish there could have been a way to do this.
I was also disappointed by the fact that, after just 4 playthroughs, the random story events are already starting to repeat themselves. The cat story I encountered on my second playthrough, returned on my fourth campaign (albeit with some very minor gender tweaks). I can’t be too harsh on it because I think is a testament to how strong some of these building blocks are that I wanted more of it, instead of less.
Less forgivable are the bugs. In certain defence missions monsters appeared as blank squares, with other occasions where characters were missing faces. More crippling was a crash bug during one mission in which moving an ancillary character just shut down the whole game. Because Wildermyth seems to have been handled with so much care elsewhere these moments stuck out like a sore thumb.
I would still say, don’t let that stop you from trying this out.
Conclusion
Wildermyth is unlike anything else on the market. A roleplaying game that really emphasizes embodying a character and a story, that also happens to have a good combat system in there. Quickly repeating story elements diminishes that vision a bit, but there is still so much that the game understands about generating drama and investment – this is a must-play that I hope gets a refined and honed sequel.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
