Tactical RPGs are my favorite game genre of all time, and I’ve become a bit of a snob about them over the years largely owing to running this site and playing through numerous fantastic and terrible tRPGs. Many of them succeed or fail for the same reasons, so it’s refreshing to see a tactical RPG like Wildermyth come along and largely avoid the pitfalls of the genre. This is the ultimate “easy to learn, difficult to master” tRPG, being made up of a few basic stats that are easy to keep track of. That’s in addition to numerous more subtle mechanics that occur behind the scenes, and these can be safely ignored or manipulated for an even greater advantage over your opponents. Wildermyth‘s difficulty curve becomes incredibly uneven toward the end of its fourth campaign, however, and the fifth and final campaign’s difficulty arises primarily from a number of annoying mechanics that exist to waste your time. Still, Wildermyth is great. It feels like it’s one balancing patch away from becoming one of the best tRPGs on the market.

Each of Wildermyth‘s campaigns is a different story, but the stories aren’t the appeal

Right off the bat, I should mention that the writing in Wildermyth can be difficult to follow. The game’s story content is made up of five unconnected campaigns—myths about heroes overcoming various evils, basically—and these are pushed forward by comic panels that can be a bit too flowery for their own good. Non-story events are procedurally-generated, and it’s also possible to have characters die or retire from old age as time passes. That means that anyone who joins your party will be treated as though they’ve always been there, with most of the history between characters being implied. Add that on top of the flowery dialog, numerous procedurally-generated character names, and later stories’ tendency to flip back and forth between the heroes and villains and you have a recipe for confusion. It’s not bad but it’s nowhere near as defined as a game with a more linear story.

This would be a major negative if Wildermyth was all about telling stories, but it’s set up more for you to create your own stories within the framework of these myths. I covered the modern XCOM back in 2013 and still remember color-coding my units; a random event assigned Yellow the nickname “Kitty,” resulting in Yellow Kitty the psionic juggernaut. Experiencing random events that cause memorable changes in characters is the sort of experience Wildermyth is all about.

My very first campaign was rough going, but I eventually ended up with two powerful melee units named Worsha Tred and Illy Rud. Over time, Worsha lost her hand, only to have it replaced with a magical hand that I eventually allowed to take over both of her legs, as well. As a result, she became a powerful axe-wielding unit whose footsteps enchanted tiles to provide friendly units with a +10% chance to hit.

Illy was similarly taken over by fire magic in a random event, and I decided to allow it to take over all four of her limbs after noticing that her fire attack was proving to be more useful than her melee attacks. She stopped being able to hold weapons, but she could launch a powerful cone of flame and defeat 4-5 enemies at a time while also tanking a ton of hits. Both Illy and Worsha were capable of soloing entire maps. The best part, though, is Wildermyth‘s “legacy” system, where finishing a story allows you to enter characters as legends who can be recruited into other stories, bringing many of their strengths along to help carry weaker units. Units also have a retirement age that begins to become an issue during longer campaigns, forcing you to prepare weaker units to take over the jobs of stronger units. That is, unless you become immortal during an event.

The fourth campaign saw a character related to the villain join my group, and she became reasonably powerful (though still nowhere near Worsha or Illy’s abilities). When Illy wasn’t recruitable in the fifth chapter—presumably because I had too many legacy characters muddying up the pool by that point—I imported this story character instead, and she ended up striking the final blow against the appropriately epic final boss of the final story campaign. Procedural generation is a minefield, but Wildermyth makes the most of it by leaning into these types of emergent experiences.

I love how the gameplay can be as simple or complicated as you’re willing to make it

Wildermyth‘s basics are simple to grasp. All units follow the XCOM mold and have two action points that can be spent moving and attacking or to move double the distance. Depending on their armor and skills, units will have a certain amount of armor (which reduces physical damage by however much armor a unit has) and warding (which reduces magical damage by however much warding a unit has). These defenses are permanent, though you and your opponents can strip away defenses for the duration of the current combat encounter by using certain weapons and attacks. It’s a simple, elegant system that’s easy to pick up without being so streamlined that it negatively impacts the game’s underlying strategy.

One of the major improvements made to the game during its time in early access are classes that units can spec into; leveling up a character provides them with four possible upgrades, and one of these is class-related. Warriors can unlock reaction strikes reminiscent of the overwatch ability in XCOM and then upgrade that ability to increase the distance that triggers them. Archers can be upgraded to inflict status effects or unlock an overwatch ability of their own. Magic-users can improve their attacks and become insanely powerful AoE units.

Wildermyth has an overworld map in which you decide which units to send where, and you’ll be making a lot of strategic decisions here; the world is made up of a group of interconnected tiles, and most of these are enemy-infested and can result in a random event and combat encounter. Enemies become stronger over time and after combat encounters, but taking the time to clear enemy infestations also means that your units will be getting stronger. Do you want to take your time clearing the whole map, subjecting your units to various positive and negative events in the hopes of them becoming even more powerful, or rush to a difficult encounter while relying on your tactical prowess (and maybe some recruited legacy units) to push the story forward?

There’s no “correct” approach—just one that suits your needs. Early on, I spent a lot of time clearing out tiles and building up my characters into unstoppable killing machines, but legacy characters only inherit a small number of their original skills to avoid screwing up the balancing, so that wasn’t a huge advantage. By the end of the game, I was rushing through campaigns, leaving towns to be destroyed by enemy raids so that I could finish quickly and avoid cluttering the legacy system with too many superfluous additions. One disadvantage of that is that you earn fewer resources to upgrade your equipment with. One advantage is that it results in fewer years of peace between story beats, allowing your powerful characters to stick around longer without retiring. You don’t need to worry about any of these systems, but they’re there for those who want to game them.

There comes a point where Wildermyth begins committing various tactical RPG sins

Generally speaking, the less a game reminds me of Fire Emblem Fates, the better it’s doing as a tactical RPG. Wildermyth avoided the comparison for three and a half of its campaigns, but its annoying skills and position-displacing attacks began to appear after that point. Eluna and the Moth is a great campaign and probably the best one overall, but the mechanics really do fall apart at the end as it embraces every gimmick it can think of to increase the difficulty through random nonsense. Most of the things I complain about in the genre are here: maps with endlessly spawning enemies, changing victory conditions that make it impossible to plan an effective strategy, annoying status effects being spammed at you, and so much more.

Eluna and the Moth survives its gimmickry because it only becomes a problem at the very end. The final campaign, All the Bones of Summer, suffers by embracing this gimmickry wholeheartedly. There are admittedly some good elements that are added (I was partial to a map with falling debris that you had to position your units to avoid each turn), but the changing victory conditions, endless enemy spamming, and inexplicable decision to give you control of a totally different—and laughably awful—party for one map nearly caused me to stop playing.

More than anything, though, All the Bones of Summer is designed to waste your time. Not only are enemies spammed at you, but multiple enemy units are invincible until they’re struck for the first time, forcing you to waste a turn removing their shield. The maximum party size is generally 5 units, so if most of your units specialize in attacks that only target one unit and enemy reinforcements are showing up every couple of turns, you’re going to be so focused on removing shields that you can’t clear enemy mobs before they begin doing serious damage to your party. The weirdest thing is that the later parts of All the Bones of Summer are a breeze. The difficulty completely drops off at the end. This campaign needs a serious balancing pass; right now the difficulty curve makes no sense.

The biggest problem with All the Bones of Summer, however, is whatever happens to hit chances once you reach this part of the game. One of the main reasons why Wildermyth‘s combat feels so good is that your units have a much higher chance to block or dodge attacks, balancing out enemies’ greater numbers with your units’ greater survivability. All the Bones of Summer makes this an equal playing field, however, to the point where you’re constantly missing attacks with an 80-90% chance of hitting because they’re being blocked. I don’t understand why this isn’t reflected in the percentage. It was such a constant thorn in my side that it genuinely led me to wonder if I was experiencing a bug of some kind. If the campaign is deliberately designed so that every map becomes a sluggish battle of attrition, then it’s easily the worst decision in Wildermyth.

(A close second? The fact that archers can’t destroy scenery using their ranged weapons. I went to destroy a banner from afar at one point to fulfill an objective, only to realize that my archer could only do so by moving into melee range. Why disincentivize using strategy in a strategy game?)

The “made of paper” look is charming, but the music is what stands out the most to me

Wildermyth has a great look, with units being paper-thin much in the same way Paper Mario and Bug Fables are. These 2D representations allow the comic panels featuring your characters to look exactly like their combat models. There’s not much variance as far as locations go, though, with most above-ground areas looking pretty much the same, and the same holding true for below-ground areas. I’m also not sold on some of the post-processing, which can get to be too much in longer maps. The last chapter of the Eluna and the Moth campaign gets to be a mess of smoke and bloom effects, and my first time playing through it, these became so prominent that I could no longer tell which squares were green or yellow, making it difficult to figure out how many action points unit movements were going to use. And that also washed out the art in a really weird way.

I have no idea how the normal-combat theme never got tiring to me. You can hear it in every video embedded in this review. It’s the track with strings playing pizzicato (for the most part). There’s just something about the way it evolves that never wore me down despite listening to it for nearly 30 hours. And if you can look past the repetition, the soundtrack has some serious highlights. The song that plays during the credits of each campaign? Absolutely beautiful. The songs that play during boss fights? Fantastic. A lot of the music appeals to me for the same reason as Arcanum‘s soundtrack does—it’s expressive, orchestral without being generic (by using fewer strings than your standard bombastic score), and lilts beautifully.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 2.5/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Wildermyth review. It took me 28 hours to finish all five campaigns, though they can be rushed or played extra slow and that’ll make a huge difference to the length.

Wildermyth review – Strategy bliss, for the most part first appeared on Killa Penguin