Wildermyth (2021)

I've played plenty of games that systemize DnD mechanics, but this is the first one I've found that accurately captures the feel of a DnD campaign: That weird mishmash of save-the-world storylines, ridiculous asides, archetypical characters and the feel that your actions have consequences. The transformations were particularly fun, and some of the events were great.

I did encounter a number of events twice across my two runs, and the procedural generation does occasionally repeat itself. There isn't quite enough variety to make each run feel unique, and on the medium difficulty setting (haven't tested the others) the combat isn't punishing enough to make the differences in the enemy factions feel meaningful. It's a fun project, I enjoyed my time with it, and the writing is quite good. But by the end of the second campaign I was starting to see the seams.

This game is worth your time, full stop.

Achingly pretty, dynamic stories abound. Much of this is the prose as it gently guides your characters along their lives. Music? Great. The art? Fantastic. Plus, there's an innovative and clever tactics game which always has implications for the story and vice versa. In both story segments and moment to moment fights, you feel like every decision counts, which is the essence of interesting gameplay.

The warm, fuzzy feelings you'll have as you watch your characters live, laugh, and cry are worth the trip alone. Go play Wildermyth!

Steam Curator

Wildermyth is starkly different than most games it shares superficial similarities to because of its extreme focus on storytelling and permanence.

It's a game that adapts the spirit of tabletop RPGs, rather than trying to adapt their mechanics. And in doing so, its created a game that recognizes that those games were never about rolling 20 sided dice... but instead about the stories that those dicerolls helped tell.

If you're looking for a fantasy counterpart to X-com, Wildermyth may be just the ticket. It's a bit less hardcore on the strategy, while being more whimsical in the setting and really focusing on developing stories for the characters. Each campaign takes place over 3-5 chapters, each of which cover 10-15 years of your adventurer's lives. As time passes, your characters age, pick up traits from random events, level in their classes, build relationships with each other, and, of course, acquire more and more gear. Your character models visually reflect these changes. New armor always looks snazzy, characters go grey as they get older, and you may have an arm turn permanently to fire (giving you a rather nice fire aoe attack, at the cost of only having a single usable arm). It's a great loop that does a better job at developing characters stories than any other procedural generation I've seen.

There are a few set campaign storylines (which seem to involve the origin story of an enemy faction) to follow as well as fully randomized campaigns (haven't tried these yet). When you've completed a campaign, your adventurers are added to your legacy, available to be recruited as their younger self in future campaigns. Their story and event traits remain, while level and gear related traits are partially retained depending on their hero rank (you can rank up a couple of adventurers per campaign).

The enemies have a nice amount of diversity, and each faction has its own enjoyable style.

It's still early access, but it's definitely worth running a couple of campaigns as it is. I did see a number of the minor random events repeated across my two runs, but it wasn't too troublesome. The devs seem to be keeping to their plan to update every two weeks quite well and the game looks to be quite modable, with a steam workshop already available. 5/5 for early access, 4/5 if they released it at their $20 price point right now.