Wildermyth Review
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Worldwalker Games' party-based procedural storytelling RPG Wildermyth launched out of early access back in June, offering a fairly unique experience both visually and narratively. And if you'd like to know more about this curious project, you can now check out this detailed RPG Watch review.
A few sample paragraphs to get you started:
Wildermyth’s campaigns are divided by chapters, and each chapter has a similar game loop. First there is a story introduction. Here we learn the main goal of the chapter, and sometimes we are attacked by our enemies, but other times we learn of a way to disrupt their plans or gain more information about them. After that the game opens up in map mode. The map in made up of tiles, each tile or region is either revealed or covered by fog of war and has to be scouted. In the first chapter only one region tile is revealed, and in each additional chapter we start on the map from the previous chapter with new fogged tiles added, which means the map gets larger and larger as a campaign progresses.
The campaign story always gives us a goal, but mechanically this can be boiled down to one of the following: We have an unexplored location we have to reach and we know where it is; We have to go to an unexplored location, but only after finding and destroying all enemy bases on the map; We have to find an unexplored location, but we are unsure of where it is on the map.
Each time our group arrives at a new tile, we scout it, and it becomes a revealed tile. Then there is a story vignette. If there are enemies on the tile and we haven’t already been attacked by them, we can choose to attack them. Once the enemies have been cleared out (if there were any) we can choose to build a settlement, if the tile supports one, or an outpost. Settlements only cost time to build, outposts additionally cost legacy points, which I’ll discuss later in detail. We can also choose to fortify our outposts and settlements, which costs even more time. Some tiles also allow us to construct bridges or mountain passes to more easily travel across the map, but this also costs time.
At the end of each chapter, we get resources for all our settlements and outposts. While we do find some equipment after stories or battles, the best way to get better equipment in Wildermyth is to craft it between campaign chapters, or before the final battle.
