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.
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.