In short, Wildermyth is a fantasy table tactics game that can be played in a few hours or as long as you want. You have access to multiple campaigns that offer different challenges and lengths – from four hours to many, many more. During these adventures you will equip a team, make decisions that will affect the course of the story, and defeat hordes of dangerous enemies in various turn-based combat setups. While each campaign is self-contained, characters you develop can be incorporated into subsequent campaigns with all of their stats, so you can build a legendary list over time.
You can take the three core classes of Wildermyth in a variety of interesting directions. Most curious and original is Wildermyth’s take on the classic wizard or magician who manipulates various objects across the battle grid and twists them to their advantage. This means you can set items on fire, hurl boulders, heal / polish your friends, and much more by making connections to bookshelves, braziers, and anything else that’s lying around. There are classic warrior and hunter archetypes as well, and I loved creating different compositions powered by poison attacks on ranged bow team compositions. While the base classes can be archetypes, there are enough different directions to go down with the progression mechanic to keep things compelling.
While you drastically change the game of each core class through gear and level-up skills, one of Wildermyth’s greatest charms is how history dictates the gameplay. As each campaign progresses, your characters interact with each other and with the world around them in comic book sequences. In these stories you will make decisions that determine relationships and more. For example, maybe a character is starting to transform into a wolf and you choose to hug it completely. What starts with a small head change can over time lead to a complete character change that affects that character’s stats and abilities.
I led one of my esteemed archers through this development, and as a result, she could no longer hold or shoot her bows – but she could tear enemies apart with a whirl of claws. These procedural stories can alter your characters in many ways that have lasting and significant effects, and you need to accommodate these changes from battle to battle. You might find a duck pet to provide statistics, or two party members become rivals. While the fight is solid, these common story vignettes are absolutely the highlight of Wildermyth and make any campaign a pleasure as you make choices that will change the story and your characters forever.
Most encounters boil down to figuring out how to strategically position opponents and eliminate them, which is essentially fun. This stays interesting over the course of a run, even if you may get into a ton of fighting as your characters keep changing as you let them. Perhaps you have allies possessed by a dark spirit or you have given your tank a giant golem fist that changes its style of attack. Things change, things happen, and it’s far more powerful than just picking trivial options from a dialogue tree – the story goes into battle in a great way, and by the end of a campaign, you’ll likely have multiple characters you love, all of them for example their struggles and triumphs.
The overworld system is probably the weakest aspect of Wildermyth. Here you manage resource gathering and enemy invasions as your territory holdings expand over the course of a campaign. What this really means is a lot of busy work that is easy to ignore when trying to work through the more interesting content. As fun as the core battle is, those extra battles can ruin some campaigns with too many battles.
If you’ve always wanted a fantasy Dungeons stylized XCOM game, Wildermyth might be just what you’re looking for. Creating a random storytelling game is difficult, but Worldwalker does it with enthusiasm and seriousness.
