It creates an interesting trade-off: if you advance rapidly, you can strike at entrenched foes while they’re still weak and limit the number of incursions you need to defend against. As time passes, regions can become more overrun, while monsters become more varied and stronger (represented by stacked ability cards). If this sounds stressful, you can rest easy knowing the progression of time and balancing your priorities is all part of the experience. As you spend time questing, your foes grow in power and periodic incursions threaten your liberated regions. The world is large and takes time to navigate. Survivors of each campaign – fully intact or maybe maimed – can go into your legacy pool and feature in new adventures. You could, of course, reload to an earlier save but it’s far more exciting to watch events play out and roll with it (there’s a toggle to force this approach). There can be weddings, the birth of children, opportunities for heroes to leave and pursue other goals, and even story modifiers if you failed a prior event. With several time-sensitive missions and the constant ageing of your heroes, you’re always on the move.īetween chapters, your characters experience periods of “peace”, which both progress time and introduce new random events. Scouting, travelling, fortifying locations, building bridges or mountain paths – it all takes time and the days march ever forward. Your party grows organically through encounters or recruiting at towns, and you can field multiple parties to simultaneously pursue the main quest and defend the lands from enemy incursions. There are a ton of deep role-playing elements to manage and gear to craft. It’s not just a gamified choose-your-own-adventure book. If you take the time to clear, research, and fortify locations, you can generate crafting materials, which can then be used to create new items or upgrade your gear in towns. At each new level, you unlock upgrades (random but appropriate for your class) and assign gear to your heroes. You gain experience and gear from each battle, which is spread between party members. The basic gameplay loop involves traversing a world map, making decisions during key story moments, engaging in bouts of turn-based combat, and upgrading both your party skills and gear. It is an impressive system and I hope larger developers can learn a thing or two from Wildermyth. However, these events ensure you grow attached to your heroes, your choices feel meaningful, and every campaign feels unique. Especially if, like me, you feel compelled to tackle every “opportunity” event. When it comes to time-limited objectives, managing all these diversions is tough. The dynamic, unfolding narrative – which fleshes out all your heroes and instills them with individual personality – is both the best and most stressful mechanic in Wildermyth. It feels as if the developers moved from strength to strength, with each subsequent campaign featuring better writing and pacing. Some feel better written or more meaningful than others, sure, but after several campaigns and a dozen hours of procedural encounters, they rarely felt out of place. Better still, most will feel like a unique experience.Įach villain-focused campaign has several fixed story beats (allowing for some flexibility if you fail certain events) but the time spent between these encounters is masterfully handled by a dynamic story system that pulls from hundreds of encounters, picking those best suited to your current party of heroes, taking into account their relationships (rivals, friends, and lovers). With several lengthy campaigns to tackle, characters you can promote to “Legacy” status (if they survive), and dozens of dialogue choices or tactical decisions that alter both the state of the game world and combat conditions, there’s no shortage of potential adventures that await you. In broader terms, it offers a dynamic story that expands the longer you play, with a lot of RNG encounters and meaningful player choice, with bouts of turn-based tactical combat and hero upgrades. Wildermyth – developed and published by Worldwalker Games – is a party-based, tactical-combat game with plenty of role-playing elements and procedural storytelling.
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