PREVIEW: Wildermyth

The proof that photorealistic graphics aren’t needed to bring entire worlds to life.

Overview

Wildermyth is a Tactical RPG based on a procedurally-generated and character-driven approach that is able to create incredible stories and make characters come to life. While a preview has already been published on this website (you can read it here), lots of new updates brought a lot of new content, letting us dive into the incredible worlds of Wildermyth once more.

Thrixl!

For those who do not know the game (and don’t want to read the previous preview), Wildermyth creates a campaign by creating a world map out of different regions. The members of the party can then interact with these regions, which sometimes triggers a new story arc, which can be self-concluding or can span multiple encounters. These story arcs are narrated under the form of comics and are pre-written, usually with sublime writing, something that really stands out about the game. When not interacting in the world map, tactical fights on a square-based grid take place: here proper positioning of the characters is very important, since both your party and enemies can interact with the environment both in offensive and defensive ways.

One of the most important new updates made to the game is the new campaign, Eluna and the Moth, and is centered around the Thrixl, an enemy type that is half-insect, half stuff-that-came-out-of-a-nightmare. The devs says that this campaign is the “most intricately crafted experience they’ve ever delivered” and it really shows: characters, stories and fights are really top-notch. You’ll quickly appreciate the company of four heroes that, this time, won’t risk the dangers of the old age: the campaign happens in fact over a smaller span of time, which means that, unlike other stories, you won’t risk losing your characters to the inexorable passage of time. That doesn’t mean that they’re completely safe though, quite the contrary: there is a lot of fighting, sometimes you get to prepare and sometimes you don’t, which is also a particular trait of this new campaign.

Without making any spoilers, the first chapter of the campaign is focused more on the story and fights rather than overland management: the party gets introduces along with special characters and the thrixl. The latter is a weird species of enemies: at first they look just like horrid monsters with an animal-like behaviour but, as you go deeper into the story, you’ll understand they have an intelligence of their own.

Map Making

Another big addition to the game is the map editor, which allows players to create their own maps and campaigns! While the game already allowed players to create both custom events and custom campaign, the last feature the game needed was the possibility to create custom maps. These tools make Wildermyth already high replayability basically infinite, since now every fight of every custom made campaign can be tailored to be different and to follow the lines of the story.

Every aspect of these tools is explained in a bunch of videos the devs made, which helps diving into the not too user-friendly interface.

Verdict?

Wildermyth was a great title born out of a great idea, with a really passionate studio working on it. Now, with the recent updates, new campaign, tools and personalization options, I can’t help but recommend it. Don’t be fooled by the simple graphics the game offers: this is a title with a great heart that will keep you attached to the screen for hours. The problem is now that, even when I’ll complete all campaigns, the possibility to just download new ones made from the community will make it hard to pick up other titles I have in my backlog.