I could say a lot of deeply unkind things about this game, but none of them are as potent as saying that Wildermyth simply washed over me without leaving much of a mark.

Wildermyth's core is comprised of procedurally generated storytelling, using very basic character tags (i.e "headstrong" or "cautious") to decide which of its myriad random events and dialogues will play out. More tags are added as random events keep playing out, with some events potentially altering a character's fate. I was fond of an early one wherein attempted graverobbing caused a character to receive a crystal embedded in their skull, altering their eventual fate so that they would begin to crystallize over time.

It's a neat concept. It unfortunately fails at the first stop because a lot of the prose on display here simply isn't very engaging. The numerous writers on board are very clearly constrained by both the text box size/event length, and also the lead writer's own defined writing style. The end result is a game where much of the writing, no matter the context, feels uncomfortably robotic and unnatural.
It reminds me of fiction (original or fan) written by those who are either particularly young or not particularly well-read: There are certainly ideas and concepts here, but they're delivered in a very brusque and unsatisying manner.

Ostensibly, the idea is to recreate the XCOM effect and give the player an attachment to their randomly generated mooks that influences how they play. I'm sure for some it'd work, but every time I sat through another boring event that followed the exact same premise of "Weird thing in the wild, dick around, profound revelation, roll melancholy music" I actually found myself wishing I could be free of these people.

And the combat is... Fine, I suppose? If you've ever played a grid-based turn-based tactics game in your life there really isn't anything magical or new on display here, and for how much combat takes up the runtime it's actually rather alarming how barebones it all is.

Everything else doesn't really get much better than 'fine', which I'm sure makes for boring reading.

The art is fine. Hits the storybook style they're going for well, I guess. Music is passable, though for the life of me I couldn't recall a single song.

Looping back to my first point, this game is so Nothing to me that most of the above is just copied from my notes. My actual memory doesn't return anything when I ask it about Wildermyth.

After the first campaign, I thought very highly of this game. Seeing your character develop over the course of the game is fun, the combat is interesting (especially mystics are very cool) and while the overarching story is fairly bad, the individual events are well written.

Then I started the second campaign and my opinion plummeted.
I was really excited for the "legacy" stuff I heard about, with previous campaigns influencing future ones. Turns out that influence essentially boils down to "you can recruit former characters" which feels less like seeing a story pass into myth and more like that one player in your DND group who just keeps wanting to play their one OC.
The much more significant issue for me was difficulty. My first campaign was on the second lowest difficulty, the “recommended” one. It was a bit too easy for me but alright for getting used to the game. So, for the second campaign I decided to go one difficulty higher. I immediately struggled way too much, to a degree where the game became unfun for me.

I still like this game and would recommend it to you if you like the xcom/fire emblem style of strategic combat, but I wouldn’t recommend the game just for its storytelling potential

Sights & Sounds
- The paper cutout/storybook visuals are pleasant to look at, and the cartoony animations match nicely
- The monster designs aren't all that unique, but still have a certain charm to them like the rest of the game's visual design
- The music and sound effects are serviceable, if not anything particularly special

Story & Vibes
- The game has two types of game modes: either a curated story (with some random elements) or randomly generated stories with different objectives and goals. Both are fun depending on what you're in the mood for
- Most of the game's appeal lies in the random encounters and the outcomes of the choices you make during them. These can have game-changing effects on your characters' abilities and appearances
- The curated campaigns are a slight step down from the randomly generated ones, but still fun in their own right. Some of them even give you unique transformations that aren't available in the random campaigns

Playability & Replayabiity
- It's a fairly standard turn-based grid-system tactics game. You move your characters in range to attack or out of range to prevent being attacked.
- Cover is interesting in this game, particularly for mages. Since all magic in Wildermyth is focused on telekinetically using scenery to attack, you sometimes have to choose between offense and defense
- The transformation system adds a ton of depth and variety to an otherwise standard three-class system (melee/ranged/magic). The skills and abilities from these transformations can even blend well with a character's class-based abilities to open up new combat strategies and tactics

Overall Impressions
- The game runs well and is quite well-polished. I haven't encountered any crashes or bugs so far, but will update this review if I find any
- I don't even typically like this style of gameplay; in fact, the only other games in this same vein that I've enjoyed are the Final Fantasy Tactics games. Because of that, I can heartily recommend Wildermyth

Final Verdict
- 8.5/10. Enjoyable combat, a progression system that leads to unique and varied characters, and fun storybook visuals make for an all-around great experience either alone or with friends

This game was so so good in my opinion and has unlimited, extremely unlimited potential! It is like playing D&D or any fantasy ttrpg by yourself on a computer but the best part is you can play with people too if you have friends to do so!

I personally like the art and think it's very unique but I know it's definitely a taste thing and not for everyone. I love the replayability of this game and how much hours you can out into it. I love the way we can save characters to our legacy and keep track of our very best characters. The stories can be funny but also feel like they are told with the depth and detail of a D&D campaign. However they don't grasp me too much, I mostly like this game for the combat and customization and stories between characters rather than overarching goal. It is hard to remember the monster names

Wildermyth is extremely cool and shows how a game can use procedural generation to craft strong stories and characters. I care more about some of these randomly assembled characters that I do the vast majority of other games. I love Hetty the witch who only says the weirdest things at the most serious times. And Marennen the warrior who constantly jumped into the midst of enemies to defend her wife. Or Pamelle, the human chimera who ended up with a wolf's head and arms, a raven's wings and legs, and a scorpion's tail.

But by the third campaign (out of five), I did start to see a handful of events start to repeat which is when the mechanical structure of the game started to be easier to see. The artifice fell away and I saw how functional each choice can be. And when I started to make each of the three classes largely the same because, even with the levelup skill selections being randomized, you can only make one warrior so different from another. But also, that was after something like 20 hours so maybe it's not so bad.

I also need to mention that I played this in co-op and while that was a really cool thing to get to do, it is extremely janky. Latency causes things to desync fairly regularly, sometimes events get skipped for one person but not the other, the text chat is borderline unusable because of how often it refreshes or clears what you were typing.

This game is so so so cool. I like it a lot. I don't have many issues with it but the issues I have feel pretty glaring. But despite that I still will hold this game dearly in my heart because the moments its produced have been so special.

A lot of very unique mechanics that pour a lot of personality over these literal cardboard characters.

I adore what this game tries (and mostly manages) to achieve but it is hindered by the long winded, obtuse writing.

Storytelling aside, the game is pretty lean - the tactical combat remains simple and the classes build all end up feeling similar.

Mystics are very unique!

I played through the first campaign and feel that the rest are functionally very similar.

Wildermyth is a cool idea and shows the potential of procedural storytelling. It has a couple of shortcomings that prevented me from really clicking with it, but there is still a lot of interesting stuff here.

The game is mostly about the storytelling and the systems in place to make things play out dynamically are impressive. It seems to use a fairly simple tagging system and a ton of writing to give a convincing mix of events that can play out in compelling ways. There are a lot of cool mutations, magical effects, and items to explore while playing.
Unfortunately, the writer who contributed the most events to the game writes in a very stilted way which makes it hard to understand and tedious to read. It is difficult to describe the style, but it reads like someone trying to write in an overly stylistic or academic way to me.
Luckily the game calls out writers for each event, so you can skip them if you want. This almost breaks the game for me.

The gameplay is fairly standard turn based strategy. The infusion ability is unique and introduces some interesting situations, but everything else you have probably seen elsewhere. The characters do have a lot of different abilities and mutations can make them all play fairly differently from each other.
The equipment system in the game is pretty stripped down. There are a lot of options without a way to tell clearly what the benefits of them are. The game suffers from stats overload.
It is also tuned to swing quite a bit. I find that I am either winning with no trouble or being destroyed without much chance.

I honestly don't like the look of Wildermyth very much at all. They definitely went for a specific style and hit it, but it just doesn't work for me.

Wildermyth is worth checking out for the procedural narrative or if you have some friends to play with in multiplayer, but XCom, Phoenix Point, or any Tactics game are better games over all.

Wildermyth has a pretty cool concept on paper. It fits perfectly into the D&D rave that has impacted the internet for many years, even more so now with the likes of Critical Role and Baldur’s Gate being as popular as ever. So, a game that feeds into the roleplaying aspect of having a party of characters that grow and evolve in a way similar to the tabletop RPG definitely sounds cool, but it is lacking in the fun and replayability department.

I stumbled into this game completely randomly and had a sort of love at first sight feeling when I was reading up on it. One of my favorite parts of these games is always to bring life into these characters and make them evolve and adapt to what happens around them. It may be corny, but making up relationships between your characters and seeing them kind of grow and regress in consequence to your gameplay and choices has always been super cool to me.

One of my favorite parts of XCOM has always been making up overcomplicated backstories for my soldiers and letting them evolve in natural but somewhat realistic ways as their bonds and the stakes progress. That aspect paired with turn based strategy gameplay just seemed like a perfect match with the procedurally generated element.

My experience playing was a bit different though. There’s a really endearing level of customization to personalities, traits and skills, but it just falls flat in the gameplay department when all it really revolves around is moving pawns across a board with a few random text events happening every once in a while. The only real strategy in this game outside of the combat is allocating where you want to send your party and how long it’ll take them to get there.

It’s definitely cool at first, but there’s a real lack of variety in what to do and how to do it. There’s a few campaigns here to choose from, all of them with a premade story that you kind of tailor your way, but I could barely get past the first before I was filled with disappointing boredom.

The game engine itself is also a bit wonky, I encountered quite a lot of texture bugs which is weird considering the low graphical fidelity and the paper tabletop inspired style.

Luckily, there’s great modding support that can really elevate the experience and fix some of this lack of variety, but for a game that prides itself on an element of procedurally generated surprise to keep your campaigns and characters fresh, it felt very stale.

I’ll definitely give it a second shot one day, because this feels like a nice mix of elements that usually keep me going for multiple hours in other games, but for now I’ll stick to Matthew Mercer and BG3 sessions.

Bar some repeatable events cropping up multiple times, Wildermyth scratched an itch I've had for a long time. I played through the first campaign with a group of friends, each incharge of their own characters, and just had an absolute blast. I then continued the next two by myself at my own pace.

Nothing too complicated about this one, but some of the emergent narratives that are created are brilliant. Writing this review 3 months since I shelved the game and I can still recall specific characters & their children's stories. Absolutely fantastic.

A game that seems amazing... For exactly one playthrough. Wildermyth is entirely predicated on the idea of your group of randoms developing into unique heroes over the course of a campaign, basically emergent storytelling but mechanically enforced rather than headcanon-based. The problem is that this promise does not match up with the game's mechanics.

First and foremost, combat is not particularly interesting, with few classes and options within combat that are pretty clearly better than others. Now, this would be excusable if the emergent storytelling aspect had meaningful implications for gameplay. It doesn't. One character could have their arm replaced with a spray of fire, permanently. What does this give them? A melee attack that almost certainly does less damage than your other options. You might say, who cares if these aspects integrate into combat, most people don't play TTRPGS solely for the combat gameplay, anyway. The problem is that, for most character variances, combat is the sole place where they have any bearing, outside of appearance, since future events very rarely reference changes that your characters have endured, unless they're explicitly seeded by main story events. What this means is that your ultra-badass 70-year old character ultimately boils down to being "strong mage #2" rather than someone with unique strengths, weaknesses, or utilities. This issue is only made worse by the fact that the game is designed for multiple playthroughs, and even by your second, you'll likely be seeing multiple duplicate events in every run past the first. This would be fine for events like "Party gets stuck in a storm," or something, but in most runs you'll have the option to have some member of your group transform his arm into stone or her head into that of a wolf, things that should be memorable, but become stock standard after 2-3 campaigns. I wouldn't be harping on this fact if the game didn't explicitly want you to play more than one campaign. As a final note, while I understand the need for artistic simplicity in making these procedurally-generated characters, the player characters in Wildermyth look really bad. The creatures, backgrounds, and overworld generally look fine though.

Wildermyth ultimately feels like it takes a lot of the worst elements of procedurally-generated games and puts them front and center, hoping that you'll be charmed enough by the stories you invent for your characters to excuse the lack of legwork the game itself does in making said characters feel interesting or unique.

One of the most popular ways of telling stories through gameplay is the RPG, whether it's the tabletop games that started the genre, or the video games that have been inspired by them. One of the advantages that tabletop RPGs have, though, is their malleability. Those who have played games such as Dungeons & Dragons will invariably be able to tell you about their whacky and chaotic adventures, consistently derailing the planned narrative; presumably, much to the DM's dismay. These experiences are, by their very nature, incredibly unique; the game's path is governed predominantly by the players, so no two campaigns will ever really be the same. Chasing this feeling as a video game developer is, of course, difficult. The game will only do what it's programmed to, so there's really no such thing as a truly unintended outcome-there's no possibility for a real unique-to-each-player experience. So what do you do? Well, if you are Worldwaker Games, you create Wildermyth.

Wildermyth's gameplay is a tactical RPG, but its true calling is to tell stories, and to get as close to that "unique to each player" feeling as it can, it relies on an innovative feature; procedurally-generated storytelling. The game has 5 built-in scenarios (plus 1 tutorial), and each begins with you randomly generating characters, encountering random events all while working towards the campaign's goal. The game's strengths are especially on display throughout the tutorial-it's slightly shorter than the other campaigns, but it introduces all the concepts nicely and sets you up with some legacy characters for further campaigns, which can be recruited later on. It's a thoughtful inclusion, and it makes sense, especially as many players will go through the tutorial meticulously, taking note of every event and developing a bond with their party. Completing the tutorial is experiencing Wildermyth at its freshest, and would no doubt spur players on to try out one of the longer campaigns, excited to see what is in store for them and their new-and old-companions.

Unfortunately, the game never improves on what it displays in its opening few hours. Wildermyth is, for all its variety, a game that is disappointingly shallow in both mechanics and story. There are only 3 classes in this game, and there's a staggeringly low amount of variety for each one. You'll get familiar with each class's abilities pretty swiftly, and with a maximum of 5 characters in combat at once, repetition will set in much sooner than you wish. The overworld gameplay is barely relevant enough to mention-which, admittedly, was probably not the focus-but you'll be doing a lot of combat, and except for a few unique bosses and maps per campaign, you've basically seen everything the actual gameplay has to offer by the time you've finished the first proper campaign. Still, it's threadbare, but it's fine-it would be engaging enough if carried by a well-delivered story.

Wildermyth is all about stories, which is a shame, because it doesn't really have one to tell. The scenarios are extremely light on substance-there's an intro and a conclusion regarding the story at the bookends of each chapter, but they don't impact beyond that. More importantly, though, is that the game is not really able to tell a meaningful and engaging character-driven story, and certainly not more than once. There are random events that happen before and after each combat, and these are the moments where you're intended to really bond with your characters. And while starry-eyed players may buy in during the tutorial, it doesn't take long to see behind the curtain. These events usually have choices which, you'd think, will shape your character over the course of the campaign. And they do; but only cosmetically, or in the stat column. There is rarely any connection between one event and another; each is a self-contained anecdote that is at first charming or endearing, but after enough time, feels more like reading exercises with flowery prose. And when you see an event repeat in a different campaign-and you will-the illusion shatters completely.

Wildermyth is, ironically, a game that gets worse the longer you play it, which seems to be the exact opposite of what the developers were going for. It truly is charming upon first play, but it's interesting how so much of what was supposed to make it an infinitely replayable sandbox ends up doing the opposite. The paper art is aesthetically pleasing, the music is thematic, but they're both used without enough variation. Beyond its average gameplay, Wildermyth disappoints because it relies far too much on the player to fill in the gaps. It doesn't feel like a story, it feels like a series of events, waiting for you to add the ever-so-important context. And while especially imaginative players might relish that chance, the fact that it has to be done at all means that any well-told story that results from Wildermyth is more of an achievement for the player than it is the game.

Wildermyth schafft es wirklich schöne, organische Fantasy-Geschichten zu spinnen, wie man sie aus Pen & Paper Runden mit dem schwarzen Auge oder Dungeons & Dragons kennt. Was das Spiel für mich wirklich auf die nächste Stufe gehoben hat ist der umfangreiche Charakter Editor mit dem ich nicht nur das Aussehen und die Fähigkeiten eines Charakters bearbeiten kann, sondern auch seine Gewohnheiten und sein Wesen. So habe ich probiert meine echten Freunde so originalgetreu wie möglich im Spiel zu erstellen, wodurch die Geschichten von Wildermyth nochmal eine ganz neue persönliche Note bekommen haben. Nicht nur ich sondern auch meine Freunde verfolgten somit gespannt ihre Abenteuer, die wirklich hervorragend die Illusion unbegrenzter Möglichkeiten und einer lebendigen Welt beschwören.

Diese erzählerische Komponente von Wildermyth ist wirklich genial. Das tatsächliche Gameplay in Form eines rundenbasierten Kampfsystems ist hingegen maximal "in Ordnung". Es gibt 3 Klassen, die schon recht verschieden sind, aber innerhalb dieser Klassen unterscheiden sich die Fähigkeiten kaum. Dadurch kann die Vielfalt des Kampfsystems nicht mit der Vielfalt des Story-Systems mithalten. Spannend werden die Gefechte trotzdem dadurch, dass einige Story-Entscheidungen sich auf die Kampffähigkeiten eines Charakters auswirken und auch dadurch, dass die Gefahr des Todes der liebgewonnen Charaktere über jeder Auseinandersetzung schwebt. Der Tod kann nämlich wirklich schnell und unerwartet kommen, was sich allerdings in Wildermyth nicht wirklich wie eine Niederlage anfühlt, sondern eher wie ein weiterer Teil der Geschichte, deren Autor und Leser man gleichermaßen ist.