Thank you Worldwalker Games LLC for providing us with a review code!

Despite my geeky hobbies and interest, I’ve never once played through a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. That’s something on my list to do, eventually. I assume that Wildermyth is very similar to that experience, as it takes inspiration from tabletop games and converts it into a video game format—because everyone knows tabletops are so outdated these days!

As a procedurally-generated tactical role-playing game, Wildermyth does the bare minimum to start your journey. Each of the stories featured in the game can be summarized as “the ancient evil awakens and you and your ragtag group of heroes must stop the evil from evil-ing” or something to that extent. And as cliché as it may sound, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.

Unlike characters that are blank slates or have a certain vision and path in mind by the director, your character’s motivations, backstory, and personality are randomly determined. Your characters will grow (or regress) throughout your journey, change both physically and mentally, and may even possibly die. Like in horrible reality, your choices do matter, and your actions have consequences. Depending on the decisions made throughout the journey, your character may come out alive as some terrible Frankenstein monster or a cynical mess. Characters are grief-stricken when their companions die. Relationships such as rivalries and romance can bloom on and off the battlefield. All of this is great because it makes you care for this group of adventurers you’re cultivating to greatness.

In the heat of battle, characters are controlled on a grid, like most tactical RPGs. Your three main classes consist of the quintessential warrior, rogue, and mage, all playing uniquely from each other and having unique sets of abilities and specialties with weapons. Warriors can hold the frontline, aggressively attacking enemies that come into range. Mages can take control of the scenery and use the environment to either scout ahead for enemies or attack with unique abilities. Rogues are sneaky, attacking from a distance and using deception to bypass armor or detection. When characters level up, they get a choice of three perks to choose from, which can range from passive to active abilities.

Most maps are fairly small with many battles taking mere minutes at a time. Nice bite-sized combat with auto-saving taking place after every turn makes it easy to play in short bursts and come back to. There are a large variety of enemies that can be encountered and every playthrough has the chance to encounter enemies that you haven’t seen in a previous adventure. The tactical combat is pretty simple, at least compared to most RPGs out there. What sets it apart from a good amount of them are calamities. Calamities are essentially buffs to the enemies that happen every time you complete a battle, or when a certain amount of days pass in the adventure. Some calamities can be prevented with the usage of legacy points (gained from annexing territory), but others cannot. A sense of urgency is there as when your characters grow, so do your enemies.

The overland sections are what you do when you’re not battling. It mostly consists of taking land and defending land, crafting or upgrading weapons and armor, and clearing infestations to prevent incursions. I don’t think the overland segments are bad, but it is noticeably weaker than the other portions of Wildermyth. After every action taken in the overland section, time passes. Some actions take days to do such as simply moving to other sections of the map, or building bridges. All the while, the calamity and incursion meters are rising too. Incursions are when enemies decide to take back the land that you took from them and depending on how your defenses are built will determine the number of enemies you face and allies you have in the incursion battles. Incursion battles are larger and longer than the average battles, and losing land has dire consequences.

Wildermyth’s graphics are extremely charming even if they are rather simplistic. The popup figures and scenery with the papercraft aesthetics remind me best of the tabletop games that it takes inspiration from, as well as popup books that I used to read as a child. It goes to show how strong a solid set of aesthetics and atmosphere can carry the look of a game. It’s great that as the years pass, characters visibly age too. The story is told in a comic-like format for all the cutscenes. Music is also utilized well, using lots of string instruments with drawn-out notes to greatly immerse a player into that western fantasy world.

Delving more into Wildermyth, people will notice that there is a lot of customization. From choosing difficulty settings to editing the comics and even the characters' backstories it’s almost like a choose-your-own-adventure book. You can name your characters whatever you want, your weapons anything you please, your team name is limitless! Now with the sheer amount of customization a player has at their fingertips, morality can get a bit skewed. However, playing as how the developers envisioned it, there are a few notable aspects. Besides the typical fantasy violence, the whole world takes place in a fantasy setting. Player characters have access to magic. Almost every supernatural enemy from ghost bears to gorgons to magic golems and so on exist. None of it seems to be based on any specific religion, however. In terms of language, the only swear I noticed is “b*st*rd”. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any other swears but I just haven’t come across them due to the nature of the game. Because of how many scenes and dialogue can be edited to your whim, you can potentially get rid of many words you don't exactly agree with. Of course, with character customization in the current climate, there is optional homosexual romance as long as the person's preferred orientation is chosen as such.

Wildermyth was a very pleasant surprise that I wasn’t expecting to be as good as it was. I almost didn’t realize that I was sorely missing such a sense of adventure as I’m so used to games taking you on another person’s journey. It was really nice, and Worldwalker Games did a lot of things right for what is their first published game. Even if after a couple of dozen hours or more some events start to repeat, it’s a very admirable effort by a two-person team. It can be kinda confusing in a moral sense because outside of the fantasy setting, you can make it as moral or immoral as desired. The developers have recently added multiplayer with up to six players all taking part in the same adventure. All campaigns can seamlessly switch from single to multiplayer, and has Steam's Remote Play option too, adding even more replayability. The immersion is easily the strongest aspect of Wildermyth so if you always wanted more story in your tactical RPG, you’ll get great enjoyment out of this one.