Wildermyth, the acclaimed procedural storytelling RPG from developer Worldwalker Games, is – after three years revelling in its many accolades garnered while exclusive to PC – coming to Switch, PlayStaton, and Xbox on 22nd October this year.
At first glance, Wildermyth is pretty familiar stuff, taking players on a fantasy flavoured adventure of party based levelling and tactical turn-based combat. Those bits are all perfectly good, but the real cleverness starts with its procedurally generated story, where campaigns are cunningly, convincingly assembled from beautifully illustrated, wonderfully written narrative fragments and choose-your-own-adventure-style scraps.
And that all builds out from your highly customisable party of characters, who each get distinctly defined traits, personalities, histories, and abilities. And each of them can forge alliances, develop rivalries, fall out, fall in love, die and be reborn is a constantly swirling maelstrom of variables that keep things fresh. And that’s without factoring in some of other clever stuff, like the way your journey – passing in days, months, and years – unfolds across a dynamic world map that evolves, not always positively, depending on your actions.
It’s a real treat – but if you’re looking for a more formal recommendation of Wildermyth’s brilliance, Christian Donlan called it a “dazzling game of tactics and narrative, choices, and memories” when he slapped an Essential badge on it back in 2021.
“I love the way Wildermyth embraces huge stretches of time,” Christian wrote, “not just the time it takes to build a bridge – tricky if you have to complete a chapter before the summer’s gone – but in the way that between chapters of the adventure you earn years of peace, and then you get to see what happens to your players during that peace. By the end of a yarn, you have been through things with these characters, and crucially they have changed. They’re older. They’ve known love and loss. Granted, some of them are now wolves. Some of them even have pets!”
Wildermyth for consoles features everything seen on PC – including co-operative multiplayer for up to five friends – alongside a reworked UI designed with gamepad in mind. It’ll be available digitally when it comes to Switch, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on 22nd October this year, and a physical edition is also in the works for PlayStation and Switch.
