Wildermyth

Cute game, very enjoyable for the first dozen hours or so. After that, some cracks start to show. Wildermyth is an overall pleasant experience that suffers from not delivering on the expectations it sets up. Combat/tactical depth is what you make of it. In terms of tactical diversity, leashing enemies at max range and then nuking before they can damage you is pretty much always the best strategy, so why pick anything else? The battles can still be fun, especially if you're the type of player who deliberately tries to avoid "optimizing the fun out of the game," but if you're looking for strategic depth you'll hit a wall. In terms of build diversity, the three classes suffer from ARPG Item Syndrome, where the weapons that are good make all the other weapons irrelevant junk. It's all fine for what it is, just don't go in expecting a tactics RPG. Procedurally generated events are fun at first, but by your third campaign the repetitive nature starts to wear a little thin. Part of the problem is the sheer volume: events happen before *every* battle, and some of them take a *lot* of time to read. After multiple campaigns, you hit a point where you recognize the event from the opening and skip ahead to just pick which buff/item you want. Events are selected from a pool based on "personality traits" among your party and who you've brought to that particular battle. These personalities determine which events are available and slightly alter lines of dialogue within them. In theory, this should make characters feel distinct. In practice, it pushes them toward becoming archetypes rather than individuals. This also bleeds into tone: regardless of their supposed traits, characters (and even most NPCs) tend to share the same agreeable, well-meaning, do-gooder outlook, further smoothing away any meaningful personality contrast. This is because events assign characters into fixed roles, and those roles override most personality nuance. For example, all “Leader” characters behave the same when slotted into a “Leader” role for an event. A “Goofball Leader” acts no differently than a “Responsible Leader” in a “Leader” event. Over time, this destroys immersion. You start seeing different characters acting out the same roles in events you’ve already seen, and sometimes even the same character behaves inconsistently across events because they were slotted into a different role. Rather than bonding with my characters, I started to feel they were interchangeable. The procedural generation aspect also means most of the time characters *can't* meaningfully reference things that happened to them in the past. Each episode is self-contained and mostly unaffected by the others. This undercuts the narrative stakes. Characters blankly move on from life-changing events as soon as the next event starts. Narrative depth requires accretion. In a good story, events build on each other, consequences deepen, and stakes escalate toward a final confrontation. The game would have benefited enormously from events responding to choices you make in other unrelated events. Instead, you get moments like this: my character meets a Crow God who turns them into a part-crow part-human and then just... nothing happens after. No one cares that their decades-long friend suddenly has wings and a beak. I can't follow up. I can't go on a quest to explore the situation further. Their lover doesn't notice or care. We're just moving on to the next event. Ok... There simply aren't enough events, not enough variety, and not enough dynamism (different characters should act differently! Characters should respond to things that happened to them!) to maintain the suspension of disbelief over multiple campaigns. The game's art depicts the party as flat paper dolls. Once the honeymoon phase ended it became clear that I was in fact playing with flat paper dolls. This all makes it seem like I don't recommend the game. If I sound harsh I don't intend to. It's still a fun game and I enjoyed my time with it. I was happy playing it. Most of the criticism specifically comes from playing the game past the 20-hour mark. Unfortunately, that's a problem worth mentioning in a game that makes big promises about replayability, party generation, and character-driven stories. It's still a recommend. Just, temper your expectations to match what the actual experience is rather than what the marketing is.