Wildermyth Review
I’ve always loved games about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary situations. Look at The Banner Saga, for example, and you see a story about farmers, hunters, and herders, run-of-the-mill Norse villagers doing their best to deal with the end of the world. Mountains may break and serpents rise from the earth, but these characters still try to hold onto what they have. Yet victory always comes with a price: a mortal cost for immortal deeds.
Wildermyth is a tactics-based RPG that follows in the footsteps of The Banner Saga, but stakes its own claim with fantastic written scenarios and a smattering of roguelike elements. At its heart, Wildermyth is about taking a group of wide-eyed villagers and setting out to stall the apocalypse. Some will die, others will grow strong, and a few will return forever changed by the journey. Whatever happens, you’re in it till the end, as each chapter builds towards a climactic final battle.
On top of the five set narrative campaigns in Wildermyth, you can also play randomly generated campaigns or Legacy campaigns that allow you to use your favourite heroes from those you’ve previously completed. There are multiple ways to make a Legacy character: keep them alive until retirement, build a monument if they die, or choose them as your Legacy hero when the campaign finishes. It’s a great little feature that complements Wildermyth’s emergent character stories, letting you hold on to your personal favourites.
Bursting with personalities
The character creation system is also appealingly simple: you either roll a random character or choose three defining hooks and a class. This makes it easier for newly rolled characters to enter the game, but also adds an element of expendability as with old school renaissance tabletop RPGs. As characters defeat enemies they level up, letting you choose from a set of randomly selected class abilities. This adds a dash of roguelike synergy as you stack them to create powerful combos.
Procedurally-generated character stories are another defining factor of Wildermyth. As you travel around the game’s tile-based fantasy setting, the Yonderlands, you encounter all sorts of mysterious events and opportunities. These stories might happen before a battle, when you scout a new tile, or occur as side quests that you choose to undertake. Either way, they are fantastic bite-sized bits of character development that see your heroes wrangle with monsters and mystical phenomena.
They also showcase Wildermyth’s wonderfully thematic writing and tongue-in-cheek appreciation of the Norse fantasy setting. Over time these little moments come to define your heroes and are revisited in the ‘years of peace’—a narrative section between each chapter that reveals what your heroes are up to when they aren’t kicking ass and averting catastrophes.
Welcoming death
What stands out in Wildermyth’s character development is how it deals with death. When a character hits zero hit points in combat, they are forced to make a decision: run away and gain a permanent penalty, or go out in a blaze of glory dealing massive damage or buffing other characters. For me, it’s the perfect mechanical representation of that same Banner Saga concept: of tough choices and the reality of regular folk fighting mythical monsters. That permanent debuff encourages those heroic moments where a heroes’ sacrifice opens the way to victory.
There’s plenty of depth in Wildermyth’s classes, too. Warriors are bulwarks who deal massive damage and lock down chokepoints with reaction strike abilities. Archers employ stealth, lay traps, and use their ambush ability to overwatch. Best of all are Mystics, who ‘interfuse’ with objects on the battlefield and use them to attack enemies: be it exploding a table into a shower of splinters, using a lamp to set a tile alight, or entangling enemies with tree roots. Each distinctive papercraft-style battlefield is littered with destructible scenery that provides both cover and an opportunity to be weaponised by the Mystic.
But for every battle you win the enemy grows stronger, gaining a buff in the form of calamity cards. These roguelike-style escalations either add powerful units to the enemy roster or make pre-existing ones tougher. Your monstrous foes also launch incursions, sewing a path of destruction through friendly settlements and depriving you of the crafting resources needed to outfit your heroes.
On the whole I’m incredibly impressed with Wildermyth. While I was skeptical at first about whether its procedurally-generated narrative events and choices would allow for cohesive character development, its stories are so well-written, funny, and relatable that it’s hard not to be invested in the lives of your motley crew of heroes. Wildermyth is the kind of game that moves seamlessly between heroes making bad jokes one second and reflecting on the nature of existence the next. This tapestry of moments feels appropriate in a game about what it means to be human, both in terms of battling against mortality and the end of the world, but also in the quiet moments of beauty that life is filled with.