WILDERMYTH

CAMPAIGNS BECOME TALES OF DESPERATE RESISTANCE

Robin Valentine: I don’t think any videogame has ever more successfully evoked the feel of a tabletop RPG. A few hours in Wildermyth is like a supercut of a fantastic year-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign. With the procedural systems as your dungeon master, you follow the lives and adventures of entire parties of heroes, each organically growing and developing in all sorts of unexpected directions. And they really are unexpected – while it’s perfectly possible for a warrior to just find a magic sword and kill a dragon with it, it’s equally likely they’ll be cursed to slowly transform into living crystal, or make a pact with an ancient tree, or upset a witch who turns their head into a raven’s.

They even age, and fall in love, and have children; eventually they’ll retire, if they survive the adventurer’s life. They’re never really gone, though – your favourites become legacy heroes who can return rejuvenated in subsequent campaigns, like pulling out your favourite old character sheet for yet another dungeon run.

Combine all that with really interesting, tactical combat and a great meta layer that sees you adventuring across the land while trying to keep it free of invasion and corruption, and you’ve got a recipe for some of the most memorable non-linear stories I’ve ever experienced. This is the emotional investment of XCOM times 100, and it’s great seeing a videogame draw on the actual feel of tabletop RPGs, instead of just their mechanics or settings.

Just make sure you crank up the difficulty – your heroes’ journeys and the tactical challenges of combat are both more compelling when death lurks near. Campaigns become tales of desperate resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, and that’s just tasty drama.

Jody Macgregor: I wasn’t sure about Wildermyth at first. I liked the magic and the papercraft monsters hopping around like invisible hands are picking them up, though the adventurers resemble smug protagonists of early 2000s webcomics. They shouldn’t be fighting mythic beasts, they should be arguing about Xbox games on a couch.

But I kept playing and I’m glad I did. In a great campaign called ‘Eluna and the Moth’, I brought back old characters alongside fresh ones, and though reset to first level they progressed in other ways. One’s flame-arm spread to cover other limbs, another went from having wings to just being a crow. Their relationships deepened as well, developing romances and rivalries that played into how they fought together. As Robin says, it’s like a tabletop campaign that runs for ages, players coming and going, all the stories getting tangled up together.