Wildermyth: Console Edition

Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of being a video game critic is accepting a game for review on a whim and it being an amazing experience to play. Of course, that can sometimes backfire as well, but that is certainly not the case with Wildermyth: Console Edition. My arc with the game quickly evolved from “This looks kind of cool” to “This might be one of my favorite turn-based RPGs ever”, even despite a near catastrophic save file bug, and some random bits of writing that felt placeholder.

Wildermyth is structured like a choose-your-own-adventure RPG, which is befitting its mix of comic book presentation and storybook art style. I’m sure there are better examples, but I was constantly reminded of playing Oregon Trail on floppy disk as a kid, adventuring across the map and occasionally having to decide if I want to ford the river or find another way around, among many other choices. In Wildermyth, you’ll make decisions on several things, including how to approach starting a fight, if a character is going to jump in front of the killing blow of another character, or whether to grab a shiny artifact from a totally ominous ancient statue. The idea is that your party of nobodies-turned-folk heroes take part in a story that you have shaped, causing you to be invested in them, and it largely succeeds in this aspect. It even has a cool post-credits montage of what each character has been up to since your glorious escapades that ties back to the events of the campaign.

At the start of a campaign, you get to fully customize or randomly generate three heroes, all the way from their appearance to their backstory, which affects their dialogue and how they interact with others in the party. The AI-generated backstories don’t always make sense, but for a game trying to be this dynamic, it didn’t surprise me, nor turn me off to its charms. There are five curated campaigns to choose from, including a starter campaign to get you familiar with the game. Each one will take you around 10-15 hours to complete, meaning there is a ton of content in Wildermyth. Narratively, the campaigns are like reading a comic book, scanning one panel at a time, with several choices interspersed within.

I admit to not being a huge fan of games that rely only on text to tell their story, as I typically get more immersed in spoken dialogue, but the comic book structure of Wildermyth pulled it off from a storytelling perspective. Instead of simply reading text box after text box, the characters and environments are illustrated in action with each panel, giving the story the momentum it needs to be effective. While some of the placeholder writing is not great, due to what I am assuming is AI generation, the actual pre-written campaign story writing is quite good. With that said, it is impressive how dynamic it is, changing based on how many people I have in my party, accounting for if two characters are lovers, rivals, or perhaps even family members.

Visually, Wildermyth employs a Paper Mario-esque storybook art style that is perfect for the whimsical nature of the game. Due to the heroes being fully customizable by the player, they don’t enjoy the same level of excellent art direction that the bad guys do. Each enemy is grotesquely hand-drawn, and while mechanically they are just different versions of themselves from faction to faction, visually they’re quite varied.

Speaking of enemies, while I enjoy the narrative execution of Wildermyth, its best aspect is its combat. Simple enough that almost anyone could pick up and play, yet complex enough that genre veterans won’t be bored to tears, it feels just right. The only caveat to that is a weird difficulty spike I experienced in the final battle of a campaign where my party was wiped out in a matter of seconds. Death is permanent, but thankfully the game’s autosave function is very generous and I was able to try again with much better results. And before you judge me, it encourages save-scumming, you judger, you! That incident aside, Wildermyth’s combat is impeccable. Each hero is one of three classes – warrior, hunter, or mystic – all of which are necessary members of your party to be combat-effective. Each hero has two action points per turn to either move or perform attacks, with some actions like Guardian (Overwatch in other games) ending that hero’s turn immediately. Actions are arranged along the bottom of the screen, where you simply select one, and then select where on the map you want to execute it. If you’ve ever played a turn-based RPG, it is nothing you haven’t seen before, but it is so intuitive that this is a great starting point for newcomers to the genre, as opposed to something like Baldur’s Gate 3.

Don’t mistake simplicity for tedium in Wildermyth. Combat is still deep enough that veteran players (and eventually rookies) will need to consider hero placement and attack synergies while thinking one step ahead. For instance, one of my favorite strategies was using a mystic’s Compulsion ability to move an enemy within range of my warrior’s Guardian defensive ability to automatically attack them. This was a great strategy to get an extra attack from my warrior when locked in the heat of battle. Each hero class is well-balanced, making it imperative to have at least one of each in your party. You need the warriors to brute strength bad guys with their attacks, the hunters to pick off enemies at long range, and the mystics to control the battlefield – no one class is more viable than the others. Still, I most enjoyed the mystic class and its ability to possess objects in the environment to use as weapons. Exploding a bookcase to damage an enemy standing next to it or launching chunks of boulders that ricochet between bad guys never got old, and sometimes it quickly turned battles in my favor.

Between battles, further engagements await on the overworld map, which contains a collection of tiles to move amongst. Tiles need to be scouted to interact with them, most of which have some sort of enemy threat that needs dealing with. Some allow you to recruit a new hero to your party, up to a maximum of 10, and one of the best features of this is the ability to recruit legacy heroes from your previous campaigns. So, if you were particularly fond of one character (and they survived), then go ahead and bring them on your next adventure too. You can also break up your band of heroes to divide and conquer around the map, just be warned that parties of two or less heroes are subject to enemy ambush. Occasionally, members of your party will feel the urge to break away and handle a side quest of their own anyway, which adds another bit of dynamism to the game. Along those lines, each campaign is broken up into chapters, and during each intermission your heroes will go attend to their own affairs, which adds life to each character and made me feel more invested in them as time went on.

Every action you perform in the overworld moves time forward, with most actions taking multiple in-game days, meaning that these stories take place over many years. The pacing in Wildermyth is so good that there becomes this inertia constantly pushing you forward. In other words, this game is flat-out addicting. You’ll get little doses of story as a comic, then little doses of combat, and then little doses of overworld exploration – rinse and repeat to perfection.

Okay, so about that save file bug I mentioned – it ended up being not all that serious, and I know it’s possible that no one in the history of video games has ever said that about a save file bug, but it’s true. The issue was that at one point early in the game it would not auto save, nor would it let me save manually, telling me that there were no save slots available. The catch is that it would not let me delete any save files, so I thought my journey had been derailed before it ever started. As a last ditch (and since I was very early in the game) I just deleted Wildermyth entirely from my console and re-installed it, which solved my problem and let me pick up where I left off, since my save files were on my console. It was strange, and I was pissed for a hot minute, but let’s call it a false alarm because it never did it again. Beyond that, there were some weird visual glitches here and there where characters would disappear, visible only by the health bar over their head, but nothing game-breaking, and nothing that can’t be ironed out with a patch.

Lastly, I did want to mention that Wildermyth has local co-op multiplayer for up to four-players that had me wishing they could translate it to online functionality. Players take turns completing actions for the characters that they control, meaning that if you have less than four human players, you or your pals can be assigned multiple characters. While online multiplayer would be nice, as it stands, the local co-op makes Wildermyth an excellent option for families to sit down and play together. I could absolutely see myself sitting down and playing this with my son if he were old enough to hold a controller.

I wish that time were now, because like one of its comic book storyboards, Wildermyth revealed its excellence to me one panel at a time. My curiosity was rewarded mightily after choosing to review it on a whim, leading me to discover an excellent turn-based RPG that anyone even remotely curious should play. In the same way that the choice I made led to this review, Wildermyth invites you to carve out your own adventures, and once you begin it is incredibly hard to put down. If you’ve shied away from turn-based RPGs in the past, or perhaps you are just looking for one that won’t melt your brain, give it a go. Or if you’re just a fan of great video games in general, behold, Wildermyth.