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Wildermyth.
Beowulf meets Kate Beaton ... Wildermyth. Photograph: Worldwalker Games
Beowulf meets Kate Beaton ... Wildermyth. Photograph: Worldwalker Games

Wildermyth review – fantasy RPG with real heart and soul

This article is more than 2 years old

PC; Worldwalker Games
Witty writing, evocative art and engrossing battles combine in a wonderful homage to classic tabletop games

Fantasy role-playing games love saying that the real treasure was the friends we made along the way, but, for most, literal treasure remains the focus. Who’s got time for the business of human companionship, after all, when there are Platinum Swords of Eldritch to track down? Thank the old gods, then, for Wildermyth, a sumptuous virtual tabletop experience from a tiny Texas studio that plays like a tale told over a campfire, deep in the woods.

Each Wildermyth session is a colourful mix of scripted events and random occurrences, but they all go something like this: a band of peasants take up arms against otherworldly horrors. You move them around a swirling parchment map, scouting regions, defeating the local bogeymen and driving back regular full-scale invasions of tentacle demons, goblins and skeletal machines.

Romance and rivalry ... Wildermyth. Photograph: Worldwalker Games

Your heroes – each a bundle of abilities and traits such as “gritty” or “romantic” – grow as fighters, trading pitchforks for jewelled spears and enchanted capes. But, more importantly, they grow as people, kindling romance and rivalry, acquiring scars to go with their trophies and venturing on strange, personal quests that often leave them totally altered. My current game includes two unlikely lovers, one with a wolf’s head and the other with a talkative parasitic infection. Heroes also age, with play broken into chapters separated by decades: if they survive long enough, they might raise children to continue the struggle when they retire.

Sadly, the threats evolve and multiply, too – by the end of a session (an evening or two’s play) even rank-and-file pests may have become deadly opponents. The game’s battle system is straightforward – player and computer take turns to move characters around a square grid – but it’s well-wrought and quietly inventive. In particular, it has a wonderful, terrain-based take on magic, with mages conjuring spells from objects, ensnaring attackers in vines or using trees to teleport.

Wildermyth’s real crowning glories, however, are its writing and narrative presentation, which channel both the grandeur and the deftness of the best tabletop games. Story beats consist of graphic novel vignettes set to string music that put across a wealth of personal history in a dozen or so lines – handily debunking any claim that you need hours of expensive cutscenes to stir the emotions. The tone is alternately portentous and wry, a mix of saga and webcomic, Beowulf meets Kate Beaton.

It’s been a while since I’ve played a game that fostered such gentle intimacy between characters – and there’s cooperative multiplayer, too, if you fancy recruiting real-life friends as fellow adventurers.

Wildermyth is out now on PC via Steam; £20.

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