Wildermyth console review

Being a child of the 1980s, I grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books like the kind pioneered by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone in the early days of the fantasy RPG. Ever since then, my taste in gaming has been dominated by titles that allow me to build a character and control their story, whether dictating their skills and abilities, or their relationships and decisions. And so it’s not hard to see why a game like Wildermyth from Worldwalker Games has me so utterly captivated.

This is, essentially, a CYOA story. It’s set in a fantasy world with no clear overarching villain or calamity, just a series of stories that play out like scenarios of various length, into which you enter your three randomised or customised characters and shape your own story through the choices you make. Similar to RimWorld or Stranded: Alien Dawn, each character has a list of attributes, personality traits, quirks, and ideals that influence the way they interact with each other outside of your direct control. While you push them down certain paths with your choices, seeing them fall in love or grow to hate one another is often surprising and rewarding.

As you progress through each of the campaigns, you’ll grow your heroes from simple commoners to mighty heroes, perhaps becoming famous or notorious for their actions. An overworld map lets you secure territory, recruit new heroes, or gather resources to craft more powerful gear. You will eventually be able to take up to 5 heroes in your party, with many more recruited and used for scouting, defending, or securing locations. They can die permanently, though, so beware how many you send and to where.

Combat is deceptively simple and great fun, employing an isometric grid-based strategy mechanic that sees you using action points to move, attack, or perform actions. An interesting suite of skills for each class gives you plenty of options in a fight, but by far the coolest element is being able to use your magic to infuse mundane items in each arena.

For example, infuse a chair with magic and you can make it explode in a hail of splinters. You can literally pick up and spread fire (which you’ll need to extinguish if it gets too close), directing it at your enemies. That said, my biggest complaint is that when Wildermyth decides a fight needs to be tough (major bosses, for example) it just increases enemy hp and damage massively, which creates difficulty spikes that have little to do with player skill. It’s irritating to go through hours of gameplay with no issue and then roll into a boss that two-shots your heroes. Of course, you can tweak the difficulty if you like, so that’s not a major problem in the long run. Combat isn’t all that common in Wildermyth and arguably not the point of the game; you’ll have more fun finding ways to avoid combat altogether.

Choices present themselves regularly, and can affect any character in your party, not just your starting three. Sometimes story beats will roll random characters together, which gives the narrative an organic feel, as though two of them are off on a mini adventure while the world keeps spinning. Sometimes during these little excursions, the character dynamics will evolve, or they might gain permanent new powers and skills for the rest of the story.

If you’ve previously played and enjoyed titles like RimWorld, this will be right up your street. It’s not quite as ridiculously procedural as that, but I can’t imagine many people playing this game from scratch and having similar experiences or stories. Even when you want to make choices to steer certain events, character traits come into play. A cowardly character will rarely have an opportunity to turn brave all of a sudden, but you can gradually build towards that.

Loot also plays a part, as you’ll gather armour and weapons, or materials to craft such. This too is random, and you get to assign who gets each dropped treasure. Surprisingly, it changes the character too, altering their appearance based on what you equip, which I wasn’t expecting from mostly static 2D models. The downside is that the models themselves aren’t hugely detailed when compared with the enemies you’ll meet, which are usually corrupted versions of normal creatures, or bandits and other monsters. Wildermyth is pretty enough, but it’s not a game that will blow you away visually.

However, I should point out that despite the generally low graphical bar, the console version is not without its issues. I haven’t encountered anything too egregious, but there are odd moments here and there when character models will show up blank for a moment or two, usually during combat. It’s not common, but it is hard to ignore when it happens.

Wildermyth is quite simply different from anything else I’ve played and feels genuinely compelling and charming at the same time. The malleable stories are fantastic, offering almost endless replayability and wonderfully rewarding adventures. For fans of Choose Your Own Adventure games, this is a must-have.