Wildermyth Review Title

Wildermyth Review: Relatably Random Roleplaying

Wildermyth is the latest attempt to capture the spontaneity and creativity of tabletop RPGs in video game form. And thanks to a few mechanical tricks, it succeeds pretty well.

Wildermyth is a fascinating marriage. Procedurally generated content inside a prepared narrative wrapper, all tied together in a beautifully storybook style tactical RPG package. 

Developed by Worldwalker Games and exiting early access in June of 2021, Wildermyth is a tactical RPG where almost every aspect of the narrative is based on procedural generation, with barely any requirement for player steering. 

All the usual fare for the genre as you’d expect from a roleplaying tactics game like X-Com or Fire Emblem. We’ve got three types of classes (the classics of Rogue, Fighter, Wizard), Permadeath, an Ironman mode, relationships developing between characters, resource development on the overworld map, upgrading gear. If you’ve a passing familiarity with the genre, you know what you’re getting in for.

The cornerstone for Wildermyth is the Campaign.

A campaign is made up of an interlinked series of 3-5 chapters. To start, you’ll be given a set of three heroes. These are randomly generated to meet certain conventions and relationships, but can be customised to your whim. Each chapter tasks your group of heroes with exploring the overworld map, taking on quests, reclaiming territory from monsters in combat and then completing the overall narrative mission for the chapter. There’s also the option to play an entirely procedurally generated campaign with no wraparound narrative, if you just want to play a “low stakes” campaign.

The quests within a chapter are procedurally generated to match your party, slotting in people and regions to match *your* version of the in game universe – The Yondering Lands. These fit within minor encounters and questlines that have a consistently thoughftul tone and more than a little humour. All encounters (in line with the rest of the game) are displayed in beautiful handpainted comic strips, with the characters being presented in an almost sticker like fashion. Characters even get permanent model updates when you add gear. Like swapping paper doll clothes around.They’re carefully placed in a scene, never changing pose in a way that enhances the storybook nature of Wildermyth in it’s limitations.

Wildermyth Quest

There tend to be two big potential pitfalls with Procedurally generated storytelling, especially in narrative driven Games like this. 

1. Content recurring. This did happen between campaigns, where I’d see the same event happen. Now to be fair, sometimes this would be spun in a different way, with different participants. And in most cases, I could make different choices this time. 

2. The procedural generation not quite meshing correctly. In a couple of instances, bugs led to strings not correctly displaying so I was just fed raw text fields for elemnts pronouns in events. Similarly, characters might vary wildly in tone between events, or even get involved in events that make no sense for them to be involved in.

And yet overall, these wrinkles didn’t bother me too much. There’s a form of pattern recognition in good procedurally generated games that ends up overwhelming the flaws. When the connections work, and the player can simply form the narrative themselves, it’s easy to gloss over the seams. 

For example, my first campaign had a pair of Rivals to start. Sam and Suthotta. Over the course of 3 hours, they were a Mystic who lost the left side of her face to a Gorgon’s curse. And a Hunter who lost his left eye to a foolhardy cursed gem. Both events random, and independent of each other. Dual leaders of Pallys Morning, perfectly in sync as they competed.

My second had Udera and Aynline. Founders of of The Enemies of The Ruby . An lesbian battle couple with bow and axe who fought on against a horde of biomechanical constructs as all their friends fell in battle around them. They aged gracefully out of their fighting roles and ended up teaching the twin children of their friend to follow the same paths as they did.

As a result, the moments of friction that the procedurally generated stories happen to generate simply haven’t stuck in my mind.

In between chapters, you’ll watch as time passes. This allows for heroes to age, retire and even bring kids up into the adventuring lifestyle. It’s an interesting wrinkle in the tactics RPG genre, making the development of heroes and families a core gameplay mechanic. Literal generations of heroes can take Even more so because of how the story grows to meet you.

Wildermyth World Map

What Wildermyth reminds me of heavily is Indie tabletop RPGs that are working incredibly hard to distinguish themselves from things like D&D. So the enemies are massive chitinous dream eating bugs, Grotesque biomechanical undead or Catfish Marauders. No goblins, gnolls or the like. Five different factions of monster, with each opponent on a battle map being populated from a relevant deck of monsters. It’s refreshing and inventive enough that even when you enter your twentieth mission of a given campaign, you might still see something new on the opposing side. 

In part, this is due to the calamity system, which is one of the high points of Wildermyth. 

Over the course of a campaign your party will get more powerful. But while time elapses in a campaign, your enemies develop too. The calamities take the form of cards, which are added to one of the five types of monster decks. Sometimes these will be minor boosts, like a specific monster type gaining +1 Armour. Sometimes it’s an additional type of monster all together. It means the enemies scale with you, and fights can be meaningfully more challenging. Sometimes even when you luck into a superweapon skill combo early on. 

What’s most interesting about this system though is that you get the option to control it. 

All you have to do is spend Legacy Points, and a card won’t be added to the calamity deck. Which is a brilliantly thematic move. These legacy points are the resource used to turn the heroes of one campaign into the legacy heroes of the whole Yondering Lands who can appear again and again as you play new campaigns. 

If your heroes never face greater challenges, how can their legend grow?

Because this is all at once: 

– a fantastic way of giving the player control over the difficulty curve 

– establishing resource based stakes for the whole campaign 

– a narrative tool for the player to shape the lasting impact of the story.

That’s brilliance in game design right there. 

What Wildermyth ends up coming down to is being so much more than the sum of its parts.

The writing and world building is prone to the whims of procedural generation, but consistently feels earnest, engaging and down to earth. The tactical combat isn’t overly complex, with each character having only a few options, but can still be challenging and lethal as the game develops. The art is making the most of the limitations of comic panels for storytelling and 2D models on a 3D plane. This simplicity lends everything a consistent style and allows for a delightfully dress up book style of character development.

None of these on their own is enough to elevate Wildermyth to great heights. But watching as these systems interact and are prodded in different directions by the player never fails to be a captivating experience.

Wildermyth is available now on Steam for £19.49

(Review copy provided by the Developer, Images sourced from Presskit)