Wildermyth review - a proper RPG marvel
Never trust a dream you dream in moonlight.
Wildermyth's heroes don't look like heroes. Not at the start, anyway. With their simple felt-pen facies, dots for eyes, kinked line for a mouth, they look like the chattering cast from a '90s newspaper comic strip, like Judge Reinhold captured by a funfair caricaturist, or like the cheery helpers that I might once have found inside an Usborne kids book that's trying to teach me about the nitrogen cycle. At first, this was a little odd, a little off, even. I'm going off on a searing adventure down into the flaming mines of lord whatever and I'm taking these rickety Dilberts with me?
Many hours in, I've started to suspect that the visual design of Wildermyth's heroes is actually something very close to genius. This is a complicated, potentially rather dense game - an RPG tactics affair, with a focus on procedural narrative and character development, character bonding. Look for depths, and the ground falls away obligingly in every direction. But Wildermyth never feels complicated. Its stacked brilliances never seem to teeter around you. And for a player like me, hesitant, inpatient, perhaps a little dim, this is important. Wildermyth has riches, glorious riches, but it also wants you to stick around long enough to find them. It's wonderfully complex, but it's also simple to start playing, and simple to get your head around. Wildermyth, and Wildermyth's art, understands the importance of being approachable. You know, like a children's Usborne book that's teaching you about the nitrogen cycle.
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Even this is not the end. My favourite screen in all of Wildermyth is the My Legacy screen. It's where the heroes you've taken through campaigns come to hang out afterwards - even the dead ones. You can take them back into new campaigns where new stories and new choices and new dangers awake. And you can look through their stats and their histories and see how much they've been through up until now. The skills and perks, sure, but also the campaigns they've been on. The relationships they've had. The things you now think of when you think about them. It never has to end. The leveling, the deepening, never has to end.
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