Each character in your party has three important character traits, like being a dreamer or a weirdo or having potential or carrying a lot of shame.

More than that, however, the writing is flexible. These vignettes can range from the somewhat generic for setting up a fight – a character falls down a hole and the other party members have to decide how to save her – to the intensely mythic, like a mysterious giant shape passing in the night, granting the party a reputation bonus simply for being able to tell the story of what happened in bars and at festivals for the rest of their lives. In a touch that reminded me of the way Metal Gear Solid 5 starts its levels by crediting the designer, Wildermyth includes a title screen for each short story that includes the author’s name.

Each section of the story is told with a little comic book-style cutscene, and Wildermyth uses those creatively to grant the illusion of movement. The first of these is that the writing is, well, really good. After that, they pick their classes, learn to fight, and roll into the main campaign map. These origin stories are usually well-told the intro in the tutorial with the character who became my spellcasting Mystic, Fern, reading a book and then having that book become part of her life stuck with me through the entire campaign and beyond. This opens with a party of three or four randomized or customizable characters being launched on the path to adventure. First, you pick from one of a small set of campaigns, which can either be randomly generated or have a pre-written main plot. Roll, Heroes, Rollĭescribing Wildermyth in broad strokes can make it sound like a conventional RPG.

It's one of those games that captures that lightning in a bottle. Worldwalker Games' story-centered tactical RPG Wildermyth is as ambitious as games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker or Alpha Protocol – but with far fewer glaring flaws to look past. It's also a dream that can never be achieved (barring some terrifying breakthrough in AI), but that makes the ambitious attempts all the more exciting when they make baby steps of progress.

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