This review is 5275 words the bottom of the page includes the video review that goes over the same information if it is easier for you :).

This game is rated T for teen it includes themes of alcohol, fantasy violence, and language.

Today we are playing Wildermyth, a game I’ve played previously and once again for this channel. Wildermyth is an indie game made by Worldwalker Games LLC, released in 2021. It can be played on PC, switch, playstation, and xbox. It has 2 DLCs. I didn’t buy the DLCs for this review and we won’t be going over them in depth because of it. I don’t really want to review them anyways as I feel like the base game needs to be enjoyable before you should even consider buying a DLC for a game. This game can be played solo or multiplayer.

The story essentially starts and ends the same way no matter what campaign. The area has been taken over and your group of heroes take it upon themselves to save the world. Each chapter leads you up to a boss fight. The final chapter is the biggest boss fight.

The draw of the story comes from randomized events and events tied to your characters. Events can occur through multiple means, most notably when you arrive at a fight or when you win one. These events can range from being centered around your party’s relationships, getting loot, or developing your character’s personality in some way. I couldn’t get a specific number as of recently for how many events are in the game, but I was able to get a number from a 2019 comment. In 2019 Worldwalker Games commented that there are “Maybe about 60 arrive at site, 20 wilderness, 60 victory events, but these don't count the events that make up the overarching plots ("villains"), and these events don't play out the same way every time.” I would assume this number has increased since then.

I love how these events are written and they feel very realistic, especially since event dialogue is adjusted based on the traits of the heroes included within it. I do want to mention however that between my playthroughs there were multiple events I saw multiple times. This can make it a bit stale if you have a lot of base game playthroughs. More content is added with DLCs and mods.

You are required to make choices during these events. Some events will have a success percentage shown and others may tell you exactly what you get out of each choice, however most are more blind. There isn’t a way of failing these events, but you don’t know what will happen when you do them. If you are paranoid about making a bad choice don’t worry there is a wiki that can tell you the exact outcomes of each option. These different choices do make it less annoying when running into the same event.

I would also like to mention opportunity events. These events are tied to your characters and their traits. These events are tied to not only to the character it revolves around but also another character in the party who acts as a sort of side character to this more personal story. These events are often followed by a fight that is limited to 3 characters. The two involved in the story and whoever else you decide to throw in.

Another way of story being told is through the years of peace that occur after each chapter’s end. I really love the fact that we get to see what our heroes do while on their break. I love how their roles, personalities, and relationships impact what they do.

This game heavily revolves around you making and deciding on your characters story through the help of the events and relationship mechanics. I feel like the game really acts as a means to tell your own story rather than it making the entirety of the story for you.

I really quickly want to go through the base gameplay loop before going into detail further. The gameplay can essentially be broken down to scout out a tile, event occurs, fight after event ends, win fights to get loot, exp, and skills, secure tile, and then move onto the next one. That's essentially what the game is and what you’ll mostly be doing in the simplest terms.

The character creation is pretty decent although for something so character focused I would have loved to see a bit more.

You can choose to randomize characters or fully make them yourself. I’m pretty sure the only thing you can’t directly change is the age of your character so I would just randomize until I got what I wanted. I also have to admit something. I spent the entire time until my latest run thinking that the personality of characters couldn’t be adjusted correctly. You can actually see me realizing how to pick and order personality traits in the footage. It makes it so much easier than the randomizing I was doing previously.

Since we're talking about the main traits, let's go over them really quickly. There are 11 main traits and your characters will be given 2 of them as their main personality. The traits are pretty self explanatory so I’ll list them quickly. The traits are as follows: bookish, coward, goofball, greedy, healer, hothead, leader, loner, poet, romantic, and snark. I think more would have been great, but a lot would have to be adjusted and written to accommodate it.

Luckily there are what I like to call secondary traits/hooks. These are 3 smaller traits given to your character. They affect their personality and how they respond to events, but not as much as their bigger traits as I can tell. Special events also occur because of these hooks. There are 27 and the hooks are as follows: brash, brokenheart, clown, creative, curious, darkheart, destiny, distant, dreamer, flirt, gritty, inhabited, integrity, literary, loyal, lucky, mysterious, nostalgic, physical, potential, proud, shame, slacker, thorny, wanderlust, weird, wildheart. Luckily, they are mostly self explanatory.

Before going into specifics I do want to mention that when picking colors for your characters you are able to pick the specific color you want. Basically it's a color wheel, you can even put in the specific hex number if you have a very specific color you want! I think this is great. It gives players a lot of freedom! You can have any skin, hair, and clothing colors you want.

You chose the gender, body type, voice, and sexuality first. These options allow you to fully customize your character’s identity. You also get to choose how tall and wide your character’s sprites are. I wouldn’t go as far as saying you can have characters with different body types, but in this game this is the closest you can get. There are 3 options you can keep on or turn off for your characters. You can allow random romances. This makes it so your character can randomly confess or have love events. Honestly I’m unsure if it disables romance entirely. It feels like it does though. You can allow random rivalries which is essentially whether or not you want your characters to start hating each other. It sounds really bad but it does provide some boosts in combat as does romance, we’ll touch on that later. And finally you can allow or disallow random children. This means if you keep this setting on there is a chance for members of your party to have children that join the party. This can happen whether or not they are dating another member of your party.

There are 8 head shapes. It's a nice touch but honestly I usually use the same few ones. There are 24 different faces you can choose from. They are simple and stylized and again I mostly stick to a few of them. Most of the more feminine faces are good, but I will admit that I struggle to like most of the masculine faces. I don’t know the really bushy and thick eyebrows feel a bit too much sometimes. I do really like all the varied nose types though! You don’t really see that much nose diversity in games.

I’ll go over hair next and if you’ve watched any previous video with me you’ll know this is what I’m the most passionate about. If I counted correctly there are 100 different hairs. They’re decent. They’re all pretty short and a bit samey to me. There are different textured hair though so that's good! In all honesty I always mod different hairs in for my personal playthroughs, but a couple base hairstyles are decent enough and honestly unless you’re really specific and picky about hair I’m sure you’ll be fine and happy with what we’re given. There's also facial hair, but there's only 6 options. I personally don’t use facial hair often, but when I was trying to make an irl friend in game we were having some issues. The options are pretty limited, especially since it's all just different beards and no mustaches. We couldn't find an accurate option for him.

Clothing isn’t something you’ll be worried about. You’ll get armor for your characters and they’ll automatically be the primary and secondary colors you picked at the start for that character. As you get more loot it will be seen on your character.

I do wanna mention that as you progress there are certain events that can change your character into a different race. For example in my playthrough Danny became crowtouched. He gained wings and that's it since the game does ask you if you want the race to develop or not. This gives your character new abilities in combat and can take some away as well. For example, since Danny uses a staff, if I chose to develop him further and give him a crow arm he would not be able to use his staff anymore since it's a two handed weapon. If he had two crow arms he would not be able to use any weapon. You cant choose different races in the character creator and the creators of the game have said that it's not something they want to add in previous discussion posts.

Your characters have a randomly generated biography that you can edit at the start during character creation. As you play and make choices events will sometimes add in excerpts into your character’s biography.

There are 4 types of relationships for your characters to have with each other.

The main and most common relationship is just pure friendship. Your characters get along with each other. Every relationship has levels from one to five. The higher a friendship level your characters have with each other the increased block chance they get from being placed next to each other during combat. It’s visually shown with text such as “don’t worry”, “I’ve got your back”. It's a really good system if you’re often on the defensive.Story-wise nothing changes much. Your characters get along with each other while still being able to have small disagreements. Its essentially the base relationship.

Romance happens randomly or through events. Two of your characters become a couple. Admittedly I should have done this sooner in the recorded playthrough to show it off a bit more. In I think my final chapter Draconic and I became a couple. Just think of it as pretending to be one for discounts. Anyways couples do increased damage against enemies who hurt their partner. The increased damage levels up the closer the couple is. Having couples works really well in how I play as I just focus on doing as much damage as possible. It's also pretty cute when you think of it in the story sense.

Couples heavily impact the story of your party. They are usually together in scenes, they talk to each other often, they use cute pet names, and other characters reference the couple. A lot of events have cute moments for couples. Its not all lovey-dovey behavior as in scenes you’ll see that the characters are still their own selves. They still retain their personality and it's still shown they can have small disagreements with each other. It still stays obvious that they love each other. If you have random children on then randomly the couple’s child can join the party at the end of a chapter. They aren’t mentioned before they are old enough to join the party and they kind of just appear. It really brings into question why they were just not brought up before and who was watching them while your characters were fighting since the breaks between chapters aren’t long enough for kids to be born and grow up into adults. It's cute, I like this addition, but if you think about it longer than a second it seems a little silly. Overall though I really like how romance works in this game.Go crazy, make yourself and your fictional crush have fun.

Rivalries happen randomly or you can choose them in certain events I think. Most often though they just happen randomly. I know it can happen due to incompatible personalities but from what I’ve seen it isn't a requirement for them to happen. I find them pretty annoying, story wise especially with how common they are. Like honestly rivalries seem to happen constantly for me unless I have them disabled. Luckily they do still provide some sort of boost. When a character’s rival stunts (which is essentially a critical hit) they are more likely to stunt as well. This increased likelihood stays until they successfully complete their stunt. Very useful when fighting, but annoying for me in gameplay.

As I mentioned before story wise its pretty annoying. Your characters are just constantly at each other's throat. What really pisses me off though is that your characters with a rivalry can have events where they obviously become closer and they seem like good friends, but when you check their relationship they still borderline hate each other. I think relationships are supposed to develop still like rivals can eventually become friends again but that never happens. It is honestly so annoying to me that I have a mod that makes this system a lot better. I wish the relationships would be allowed to evolve a bit more over time.

The next relationship is family. It isn’t like the others where it provides any buffs its just a way to show who is related to each other. Characters with family will reference them often in events and it only reality impacts character story. Family members can either be friends or rivals with each other.

There are 3 classes in this game. They’re the basic fighter, archer, and mage archetypes. Really quickly I do want to mention that after every fight your heroes gain xp. Heroes will level up/ be promoted as they continue to gain XP. After every level up you can choose a new ability. I really like how many different abilities there are. It helps a lot with replayability and with being able to differentiate your heroes. Since there are 5 slots in the party, but only 3 classes this helps a lot. Every hero can hold two weapons/ loadouts that they can switch between during combat.

Warriors are melee based heroes. They use two handed melee weapons, swords, and they can use shields. They focus on taking damage and attention away from their more delicate party members. I like to think of warriors as tanks, but of course you don’t have to treat them as such.

Hunters are ranged heroes. They use bows and cross bows. A lot of their abilities go into placing traps or holding space. They also tend to have abilities that emphasize stealth.

Mystics are ranged magic users. They use wands and staffs. I really like how magic is done in this game. Mystics have to interfuse with the environment to do damage. This means your abilities are restricted to the environment. It feels a lot more grounded than just having a bunch of spells based on a mana system.

There are many different stats for your heroes that will change as they grow and as you give them items and equipment. Stats are also influenced by age, class, and race/ whether or not your character is transformed. I’ll list the stats and what they mean briefly.

Health is self explanatory.

Speed influences how far characters can move with one action point. Don’t worry we’ll go over action points soon. It also impacts how fast characters travel on the overland map.

Armor subtracts from incoming physical damage. Warding is essentially the same as armor except it reduces damage from magical attacks.

Accuracy is also self explanatory, it decreases the chance of missing an attack.

Stunt chance increases the chance of an attack of stunting an enemy which essentially is like a critical hit if you want to compare it to other games. It deals extra damage and can give off different effects. For example if you have a hero using a weapon with the leaf elemental then there is a chance of an elemental stunt which will grant two temporary health to the attacker.

Bonus damage is of course bonus damage added to attacks. Spell damage is the same, but for interfused attacks. Potency is used to determine damage done by magic attacks.

Dodge is of course the chance of your hero dodging an attack. Block is the same just for the action of blocking.

There are two stats that are more campaign/story based. Recovery rate determines how fast injuries heal.

Age is the second stat and the most important. Thus it is getting its own section. Your characters will age as you play and all of their stats will be affected by it. As your characters get older things such as their dodge chance, vision, and speed will decrease.

Age also plays a big role in how long you’ll have your heroes for. Retirement age starts at 45, but can be increased by things such as class or completed opportunities. As you can imagine after reaching retirement age you will not be able to play as that character anymore. This adds a realistic twist, but I’m not the biggest fan of it personally. I really like keeping my characters and I feel like they can tend to retire pretty early. I do want to recommend that there are mods to take care of this issue if you’re on PC.

Combat, abilities, and movement is all based on the actions system. Generally you can use 2 action points per turn. For example you can move once then attack once before your turn ends. If you have leftover action points they don’t get carried over to your next turn. There are technically 4 types of actions.

Free actions don’t cost any points to do. This is reserved mainly for swapping weapons.

Swift actions are their own thing basically. Heroes can do 1 swift action a turn and it doesn’t take away from your 2 action points. Swift actions are reserved for specific skills. If you want to do 2 swift actions in one turn then you will be charged an action point for the 2nd swift action you do. As I stated before, the first one is free.

Single action abilities are abilities that take one action point to use. For example moving would fall under this category.

Single action, turn ending abilities are abilities that take one action point to use and they end that character’s turn even if they still have an action point to use. Actions such as attacks and some abilities fall under this category.

Line of sight matters in combat as does cover. For example your hunters can’t attack what they can’t see and their attacks will miss often if an enemy is hidden behind cover. Along with taking cover your characters and enemies also have chances to dodge and block attacks. Attacks can also just straight up miss, you’ll see the chance of hitting an attack as a percentage when hovering over an enemy.

Damage is determined by the base damage stat, bonus damage, spell damage, and potency. Some attacks also have other effects. Attacks that have shred effects will remove one point of armor for the remainder of the fight. Attacks with pierce can ignore armor and warding.

I should also mention or I guess reiterate is the walling mechanic. When heroes are standing together in combat they both reduce the damage they take by one. It however doesn’t stack.

If your characters end up taking too much damage you’ll see the mortal choice event. You’ll be given 2-3 options to choose from. They are as follows: Hero is maimed (loses a random human limb), Hero is scarred (penalty to charisma and retirement age), Hero loses an eye (penalty to melee and ranged accuracy), Hero loses 2 health for the rest of the campaign, The equipped artifact weapon is destroyed, Hero dies, deals 10 damage, and Hero dies, +3 armor to party.

If a hero’s health goes to zero again in the same chapter, they cannot avoid death. You’ll instead see the event named Final Moment. The options include: Hero dies, deals 1-2 damage and Hero dies, party gains an augment which provides a buff to them. If you’re playing on normal then you’ll honestly be fine. The game isn’t too hard at least in my opinion so I wouldn’t worry about seeing your characters die constantly. You also can customize the difficulty of your campaign if you want to focus more on the story.

The items in the game are pretty self explanatory. You’ll find items after every fight and after securing towns. Items range from weapons, to armor, to belts, and accessories. Items are used to boost stats. You can pick who gets what item.

There are actually a lot of different types of enemies. They can be found on hostile tiles. Enemies can range from race and type. I found all of the enemy designs and abilities interesting and unique. There are 5 factions/races of enemies. They all can be seen in campaigns even if they aren’t the main enemy type. Generally enemies will be similar to player classes so you’ll have some melee enemies, some ranged, and some magic wielding enemies.

Gorgons look like alien creatures or animals that have been corrupted as shown by their glowing blue eyes.

Drauven look like lizard guys. I’ve got to add that I absolutely hate the Stormthroat enemy. They are so annoying to me. They’re well designed, just annoying to deal with.

Deepists are horned creatures. A lot of them look humanoid but not all.

Morthagi are mechanical, steampunky creatures. I think I like these designs the most. Welding is my favorite. I don't know, I just really like him. You also can get one to join your party if you do a specific event right.

Last is the Thrixl. The best I can describe them is that they sort of look like bugs. I actually don’t remember seeing these guys ever. I actually thought they were a part of DLC at first. They look interesting and I really like their colors though!

Through events you’ll be pitted against some unaffiliated/different enemies. You can see some new creatures or even other humans.

Every enemy type will have a strength. It determines the number of enemies or foe cards that get drawn at the start of combat. Each foe card also has a sort of strength which determines things like their damage and health. Foe cards are upgraded after every campaign and when the calamity timer is up.

If a tile with enemies on it is next to an explored map tile then an infestation will occur and spread. You can clear it by clearing the tile itself or by clearing the enemies on the tile causing the infestation. It is important to note that if you go on an infested tile with a group of 3 or less heroes then you have the chance of being ambushed.

Incursion is essentially an enemy army gathering to go through tiles you have cleared. There's a timer at the top that tells you exactly how many days you have until the incursion starts. Incursions spawn from uncleared tiles and they can ruin town sites that you have built if they aren’t taken care of. Luckily if this happens you can rebuild after you defeat the incursion. You can also build up defenses of tiles which will fight off the incursion for you.

After fighting on tiles you will more likely than not be made to help rebuild a town. You can either do it quickly or take your time to find an item. Towns also give you resources at the end of each chapter that can be used to upgrade your heroes weapons and armor.

They don’t really do that much other than that. At the start of each chapter you can recruit one character at a town and you can build up a town’s defense, but that's about it.

There are actually pets in this game. There are 12 pets in total. Some have some sort of requirements needed to see and adopt them in your campaign, but most do. Each pet has a special ability or buff to give your character. They are admittedly basically just accessories, story wise. But I absolutely love these stupid little guys. As soon as I even think there's an opportunity to get a pet that becomes my main priority, nothing else matters.

As mentioned before multiple times probably at this point, there are chapters. Chapters end after you clear all the hostile tiles from the map. At the start of each chapter calamities are added and they cannot be removed. This keeps your enemies dangerous as you continue to get stronger. This was intended to be its own long section, but I think I’ve described the chapter's function and what comes along with it well enough in all the other sections.

At the end of the final chapter there is an ultimate boss fight. The boss fight is dependent on the main enemy of your campaign. I personally found the boss fight pretty easy for my recent playthroughs. They were essentially just rushing the main boss and the smaller ones before more enemies spawned in. I remember them being very stressful when I first got the game though so maybe that's a I just got better at these games type of thing.

After the boss is defeated you’ll be shown the credits while you see what your heroes do after the fight along with some flashbacks. I personally wish we would see more of what they do after the campaign ends. Each character gets just one slide and I think for the finale there should be more since the characters are really wrapping up their story. The flashbacks are a nice touch, but I really want to see what happens to our characters after the fight/war ends.

Multiplayer actually doesn’t have a max as far as I can tell. It is recommended to not go anymore than 5 since that's the max amount you can have in one party. In my opinion this is the best way to play, but that could just be me. I will always prefer doing things with friends than on my own.

Multiplayer is essentially the same as when you're on your own except everyone can take control of their own characters. Nothing major changes except you have to talk out decisions and trust in your friends to do the right things in combat.

Oh I should also mention that if your group wants to play with DLC only one person in the group needs to have it. Perfect system in my opinion.

There are currently 2 DLCs for this game. The first one revolves around adding new armor and transformation skins. It essentially allows you to change up the different builds you can do by a bit. Honestly I wish this wasn’t DLC. I don’t know, I feel like this all would have been better if it was base game. I don’t like DLC that essentially just revamps part of the game while not really adding anything I would consider new. New armor options are great and definitely needed. I always felt held back by there only being essentially 2 per class, but when you really think about it, did it really need to be DLC? The DLC is decently cheap at 5 dollars, but even then I wouldn’t see myself buying it.

The next DLC improved a lot upon the last. A lot of new things and systems got added instead of it feeling like a paid update. It adds a new challenge mode that changes the game's system entirely. The map is changed, how items are gathered, heroes develop, and combat. It looks pretty interesting. It also adds a new campaign. This DLC adds a lot, even more than I’ve gone over. If you enjoy the base game this is the DLC I would recommend out of the two. It is 10 dollars so its more expensive, but it does add a good amount of content.

If you are on PC I honestly really recommend mods. There's a lot of them in the steam workshop making it very easy to add them to your games. You also get to pick and choose which mods you want to use per playthrough.

Mods vary from pure cosmetics, balance changes, events, to weapons and armor. I personally use mostly cosmetic mods in my playthroughs. A lot of them are different hairs and faces mostly.

The game is good without mods, but if you're on PC keep in mind you can customize your game even more. I really like it when mods are available to me, it keeps me from getting bored.

Overall I really like this game especially if I have friends to play it with! I’ve played it a lot recently after remembering it exists which is kinda wild if you consider what games I normally put my time into. There are some issues I have with the game which is why I exclusively play modded. I honestly don’t think I could or would play vanilla for that long. I highly recommend it for those who want to make and develop their own characters and storylines while having essentially an outline to follow. I’d say this game is worth a try. It’s 25 dollars so it's cheaper than most games now, but it does seem to go on steam sale decently often. If you’re not sure about this game, wait till a steam sale where it's like 16 dollars.