Wildermyth review – a proper RPG marvel

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.

It’s more fun than that, and that’s not to knock Usborne. In truth, I suspect Wildermyth is more fun than almost any game out there at the moment. I have been told to play this many times over the last year by colleagues and friends who are far smarter than me. Then they would start to describe Wildermyth, and I got a bit afraid. What awaits? Nothing less than the classic dungeons and dragons experience. A party, a quest, a bunch of nasty creeping things in the way. Twists! Loot! Choices! Lineages! Get at it. But listen: there is nothing to be afraid of. There is only joy, only treasure.

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