Wildermyth

"Something in the woods is very strange

Birds have started singing songs of change"

 

Umm, not to nitpick, but your logo reads "saggyboobildermyth" and unless I see a helluva lot more battering ram action, that is falsely advertising a whole different fantasy subgenre!

 

Anyway, I've been putting off a Wildermyth summary due to conflicting impressions. Initially annoyed at its tabletop fetish elements, I quickly grew to love its core storytelling principle of taking heroes from humble beginnings as farmers with pitchforks and gradually building them up through chance events, avoiding the by now incredibly tedious Chosen One narratives of the Fantasy genre, fixating not on the foregone conclusion of an end-game power fantasy but various characters' tales of becoming. And really, Wildermyth appeals primarily as an RPG fan's RPG, addressing many such old complaints, my own included in the case of its magic system.

Almost entirely dependent on environment, your casters use various landscape objects to fuel their attacks. While they can be powerful in sheer damage, these more aptly fill in the offensive support elements of rooting or debuffing or shooting around corners, and magical or not, skills often show useful, situational applications. You can bounce a stone discus to an otherwise out of range target, knock an enemy back into range of a guarding warrior who didn't have enough move to reach, use splash or quick-action token damage to burn an enemy's defense, use fire to herd enemies into an archer's ambush. The tactical combat may not look deep at first glance but its elements interact for a great deal of unexpected complexity. Fights are well-varied with some requiring a bull-rush, others a gradual phalanx advance, other times forcing you to retrench.

If you can't tell, my fighter was nearly dead (and enemies will rather ruthlessly take advantage of that) but backing into a room with traps on the floor and an ambush on the doorway pretty much guaranteed the last mob would never get a shot off. 

 

But... Wildermyth retains D&D's reliance on over-randomization. High damage ratios encourage save-scumming, especially as your characters can very easily get killed/maimed in a single round based on an unavoidable roll of the dice. The opening fights of campaigns are quite apt to place you in nearly impossible fights before you've had a chance to level up any skills. Not exactly an increase in meaningful difficulty so much as "rocks fall, everyone dies" frustration. Also, your five-man band will plateau in their tactics sometime around the middle of longer campaigns, and as it's unwise to swap younger, lower-XP heroes in, you'll likely find the last ten or twenty combats quite repetitive. And almost all XP is combat XP. Forcing older heroes to retire may partly address this problem, but once you get a feel for the system you'll likely end up swapping them out even earlier to set up a fivesome for the end-game, which counterintuitively means that latter group will spend even more time together, running the same strat to soak up enough level-ups for the boss fight.

 

That "legacy" system for recruiting your old campaigns' heroes to a new one also sounds better on paper than in execution.

Recruiting old heroes makes them young again, or even revives them. It gets a bit goofy when a young sprat who learned at the old witch's knee one campaign ends up as her suddenly younger self's grizzled old mentor in the next, and it precludes any greater family tree development. Unlike for example the gut-worm quest, this harms internal consistency, not just "realism" and saps that long-term relationship building promised by their character sheets. After only the third campaign of six I found myself trying in vain to ratchet back my "legacy's" clutter of randos. For how ambiguously this plays out, let me tell you the story of Flamena the fuck-up.

When I recruited her in the second campaign she managed to get wounded in her very first fight, then lose a leg in another. At the end I "forgot" her from the legacy, only to have her inexplicably show up again... and again... and always just when I needed another huntress. So I gritted my teeth and made do with her lackluster performance. I laughed out loud when her daughter Flinena joined the band in the fifth campaign only to... you guessed it, get knocked out out in her very first fight and acquire exactly the same face-wound as her idiot mother. Which idiot then, in the climactic boss battle, one round away from near-certain defeat, ended up landing the winning hit on the big boss.

 

Well, y'ol flop-winged bat, what can I say, you were due. All golf-clap for the mighty dragonslayer. Is that a good RPG story? I guess... but too little of it was player input and too much a bug in the legacy system and comically repetitive randomization. I can't recommend all that heartily a game system more entertaining in its screw-ups.

 

That sort of wishy-washiness taints most everything else as well. There's no way to pass down artifacts as clan heirlooms, family relationships have little or no impact, and in fact you're explicitly building a new clan every time. Map locations are utterly forgettable. The cardboard cutout graphics aren't too ugly (hell I didn't complain about them in Shelter and I won't here) but the figurines' limited gamut of poses, animations and components gets, again counterintuitively, more repetitive than if they'd used simpler, more stylized pawns a la Rimworld.

I always loved that face.

But Wildermyth's biggest bugaboo comes in the form of writing. When I asked what can change the nature of a game, actively generating text was one of my stated options. But whatever LLMs are making of that now a few years after the fact, it's clear Wildermyth's approach, of swapping single words into the same sentence, or altering pre-written replies according to character personality flags, didn't get very far. The single word swaps forced very stiff dialogue which could accommodate any [FRUIT] while not being able to comment on its fruitiness, while the characters' personalized replies created non-sequiturs or jarring mood shifts. Repeating the same mini-quest is not made any fresher by one guy talking about apples instead of pears while the other randomly hates/loves them, especially since these are not allowed to impact decisions. Moreover, spotting such changes feels more like spotting the zippers on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers' suits back when I was ten. Aaaand, channel change. 

 

Sadly, this last complaint cuts to the very heart of Wildermyth's appeal in recreating the old fairytale spirit of adventure. Though less than in Sunless Skies, the florid prose tends to crawl up its own ass as often as not in attempting to imitate old-timey jawin' and simply lacks a coherent concept of the world it's describing. Folklore, writ large, is simply too wide a category to have attempted to imitate even in a game with ten times Wildermyth's staff, scrambling in vain to rebuild half a dozen different boogeyman myths from universal principles. It's too inchoate to sound authentic or immersive. Occasionally the ridiculous turns successfully to heart-wrenching melancholy (Shy and the Shadow, When Dreams Were Young, both lovely pieces) but this tends to happen with vignettes written as single contiguous narratives.

 

Even then, it's hit or miss. The writers simply lacked either the practical experience or historical research to adequately portray a pre-information-age social milieu, and if that sounds familiar, it's a complaint I've leveraged constantly against more recent authors, whether in comics or in games like Solasta, Sacred Fire or The Necromancer's Tale where characters sound like nothing else but twenty-something, 21st-century yuppies babbling around the game table. Even with the best of intentions and a solid core concept, generations raised incapable of gazing beyond their own navels prove incapable of describing any other society but their own immediate clique. Anachronistic, politically correct, unaware of class interplay except to spout a few interest group slogans by rote, needlessly florid or innocently crass, it's the modern perversion of storytelling into soapboxing and fan service that seems to harm recent cRPGs more than their interactions or aesthetics. 

 

And I would have expected better based on first impressions. The core atmosphere, the mood music, the attention to descriptive sensory details, the heroic trajectories, are solid. The Austin clan seems to have some connections too. I had certainly not expected to see Ursula Vernon's name among the writing credits, unless the name's a complete coincidence. Disappointed that this only seems to reflect one short credited interlude about a turtle, still her more coherent example of such modernized folklore in Digger should not have been ignored. A worse and more pervasive influence likely came from Shae Rossi, who if I'm not mistaken is the feminist cretin largely responsible for ruining LotRO from the pandemic onward. Though (I'll admit it) her ignorant, vandalist approach to folklore works better in Wildermyth's looser, happy-go-lucky interpretation of adventuring than in deliberately shitting on Tolkien for her own gratification.

 

Sad, because though it does not quite reach its ambitions as interactive storytelling, Wildermyth hits its mark quite often. I have begun every time with a sense of wonder and ended with a sense of accomplishment than no bombastic trailer or achievement list can duplicate. Several of my characters have acquired personalities in my mind, the boisterous shock troopers, the reliable one-eagle-eyed sniper and soft-spoken support caster, the versatile mid-range combatant, the grim-faced brick wall. Some events here and there are spot-on calculated to make for a satisfying narrative and strategic payoff.

At least it wasn't a bible in his breast pocket.

It's well worth playing, and serves as positive example in many respects, but also disappointing in how often it gratuitously undercuts its own strongest features. Sometimes you just wanna smack the good ones upside their heads for their fewer mistakes, y'know?

I faff in the face of danger!

Mister Drab-Pants

Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough vs. its Shivaree cover

 

As I wrap up Wildermyth's campaigns, I find myself looking ahead to which RPG I want to queue up next. Owlcat're dragging their feet with that last Rogue Trader DLC. Or... I've been wanting to replay Mask of the Betrayer for nostalgia' sake, but on firing up NWN2 on my more recent computer I find it utterly riddled with graphics glitches and lockups, so that ain't happenin' yet. Or maybe... Witcher 3's been sitting in my collection forever. I was afraid it wouldn't have enough stuff to kill but I hear it's been remonstered now.

 

To sweeten the deal, my ultra-exclusive-dooper-super edition is offering me fancy duds. The schmanciest! I mean, I guess I could do without the... frilly... feathery... leather flake crap around the neck, but aside from that, as fantasy armours go, it's a remarkably down-to-earth design. As fantasy video game armours go, even more so. Hell, it appears a strict requirement of interdimensional travel to get persistently kitted out in one flavor or another of absurdly baroque furry/ferric finery boasting enough frills to make me look like I've been swallowed by a turkey buffed to an eye-searing gloss. MMOs of course have been the worst offenders over the past couple of decades, needing to consistently bait their audience into the cash shop with statelier and statelier status symbols, but it's not like you could escape it in single-player either, likely thanks to the long tradition of fantasy story illustrations being an ergononic nightmare.

"Everybody got their pom-poms? Let's go tickle evil."

Flanges, frills, florettes, reliefs and embroideries, flared spikes and spiked flares, scutes, flutes and zoot-suits, oh my! Even plain cloth gleamed in the light like it was all triple-thick satin dipped in jewel dust. Flippin' hell, it was harder to find armour in Baldur's Gate 3 not dreamt up by a fifteen year old girl on a Red Bull bender. Let's not even get into Japanese games' costume design.

 

Much as I hate to admit it, there is some backing for this in our historic record, as advertising wealth and power has always entailed an inordinate degree of... well "bling" for lack of a better word. While visiting the treasury exhibition in Vienna, I did a double-take on seeing the so-called "sword of St. Mauritius" realizing it was the only piece on display equipped with an actual handle which might conceivably be gripped for more than five seconds, instead of some knobbly, slippery, jewel-encrusted eyesore. And yes, yes, I Get It, they're ceremonial pieces that were never meant to see more use than a bishop's bible.

 

... but then, is my game character strictly ceremonial? Because I was hoping to take him out for a spin. Maybe track some mud on an ogre's carpet. Maybe both pummel and pommel some bad guys. Maybe track down a dryad and check the armor rating on my codpiece, if you catch my driftwood. But whatever my adventures, one type of character I have no interest in roleplaying is the type of ditz worried about glitz over substance. Must everything be disco, my dear dancing queens? Has society gotten so feminized that our escapist fantasies no longer have room for the sort of grim Yojimbo With No Name who in real life owns ten gray shirts? (No that I!... okay, yes, yes I do.)

 

You really want to tempt me with a collector's edition bonus? Offer me rags! Sack-cloth protection over a comfortable plain beige linen shirt, a pile of mismatched furs and leathers, an unadorned verdigried hauberk dented with a thousand blows, scuffed, blatantly re-soled boots as shapeless as the badgers they were probably made from. And just to meet you art fags halfway, if you must embellish, I will admit there's a sort of busy visual design even wolf-men will abide:

thus, the lotus, from humble mud

The overgrown, the tangled and patchwork and decrepitly layered, the clanking, fluttering dregs of a misaligned loom and cross-eyed cobbler, the heavily downcast dross of a long-crumbled forge all stacked atop each other, the strength of entropy repurposed, portable exposed brickwork, let me clad at least myself as urban or verdant decay embodied, a crumbled brutalist temple tridiunal, and I'll forgive you far more of your foppish frippery.

I took a walk in gusty -20C weather last year and lucked out witnessing some unfamiliar behavior from these all too familiar dung factories, Canada geese. Until then I had never seen how their type handle a "to build a fire" situation.

Apparently they still fear predators more than the cold. Instead of taking shelter they were out on the ice, lined up uniformly, aerodynamically, crops against the prevailing wind like a fleet into the current, feet and head protected, letting it flow over them. Compare to a still protected but less orderly arrangement on a calmer day just a few degrees warmer.

I guess there are degrees of hunkering down in comfort even for a walking down comforter.

Kindred Not

I'd planned to summarize my thoughts on Wildermyth for tonight, but decided I'd rather run at least one more campaign (having finished 4/6) before doing so, and a common weakness instead reminded me of one of the internet's many dead webcomics. (So that'll be next week instead.)

 

Kindred Not tells of a motley band escaping not to but from their world's large militaristic superpower. How's that for a change of pace from the past years' news cycle? Similar to my comments on Tangled River, it opts for a drawing style more popular in the mid-20th century. Clean lines with characters realistically proportioned but somewhat stiffly, theatrically posed. (Dick Tracy always jumps to mind.) Except instead of using it to illustrate a subgenre popular in that era, it uses the previous century itself as setting.

 

The author went to some pains to reference appropriate decor in everything from wallpaper and lamps to cookware and haberdashery. Admirably so, and it makes every establishing shot a treat. But if reference images and preserved historic buildings serve well enough visually, when it comes to practical details she quickly runs into younger generations' difficulty in portraying a society still teetering between industrialization and traditional life. Feeding cow's milk to an infant without boiling it first? My grandmother would've twisted yer ears right offen yer head, girl!

 

And that's the more pervasive issue: not just practical details like the milk, but the mundane tone of life in older societies which modern authors fail to grasp on an intuitive level: the casual acceptance of corporal punishment and other physical violence, the more or less strict separation of the sexes in both labor and leisure, the dictatorial work ethic, what has now become the world of yesteryear was not just furnished differently but acted differently in a myriad subtle or striking ways. I'll have to revisit this topic in wider detail elsewhen, but for Kindred Not's purposes, the very flavor of dialogue constantly torpedoes that visual immersion.

 

It's only looking at such newer works of fiction that it becomes apparent how unaware modern audiences appear to have grown of the officiousness dominating interactions as late as ~1990, much less 1930. The insistent "mister" this-and-that or various honorifics, the weight carried by a "miss" versus "missus" or the strict adherence to greeting formulae, polite society was a lot more... well, polite, in the old days. Politely violent, politely sadistic, but polite nonetheless, and if you're writing period fiction you really need to get into that mindset. There's a scene early in Kindred Not's second chapter where the teenage girl brings her new male acquaintance to a safehouse operated by a family friend. As soon as she opens the door, the new guy grabs her from behind by the shoulder to warn her from divulging too much information. Uhhh... no! Ronan would've punched Caden square in the mouth in that moment, no questions asked, I don't care what early 20th-century country you're emulating for your fantasy. And sadly, an inability to enter that mindset drags many new works of fiction down, Kindred Not included.

 

___________________________________

 

 

Addendum:

A good comparison might be drawn to a page from Erfworld featuring, as its parody du jour, "chief healomancer" Pierce. You can practically hear Alan Alda's halting giggle and self-conscious smirk in every line of dialogue, a particularly interesting case because Alda's Pierce was himself a seventies' impression of fifties mores and the transgression thereof, mixed with roaring '20s stage comedy. Yet Rob Balder vaulted seamlessly across those more than a century's worth of generational barriers. It is never unclear where the lines of propriety lie and how deliberately they're being trespassed. The information age spy attempts modern seduction, feigns fifties pudeur, is teased in the tones of the sexual revolution and the punchline lands straight out of Groucho Marx' lips. Now that is a firm grasp of milieu!

Oh, no! I forgot to help McGruff take a bite out of crime!

Anoxia Station

Indie gaming. Sometimes you get burned.

Anoxia Station boasted an interesting enough hollow earth premise to con me into shilling out a few bucks instead of letting it inevitably drop to the fifty cents it's really worth at most. Whether it's a cynical asset-flip or sophomoric grandstanding, just don't bother.

 

I've already criticized its abuse of dim or no light, but that's the least of its crimes.

 

It tries to shoehorn real-time elements into what is obviously a turn-based base-building strategy game, like a turn timer or rapidly clicking buildings to extinguish fires. It works just as well as it did for M.A.X. 2 thirty years ago. What's that? You've never heard of MAX2? That's right, you haven't.

 

Its creative side has you chasing curios nonsensically in lieu of actual content. Its hollow earth vision is just a random "attack of the giant whatever" litany. Snail, moth, eel, worm. Yeah, whatever. It never makes good on such cheese like more expert approaches.

 

Then there's the interface wrangling, like the mouse pointer being slightly offset vertically. Or frozen mobs taking control of your camera for several seconds at the start of each round for dramatic effect, which then repeats every single turn they remain on the map, per mob. Or the timesink of reassigning leader passive bonuses every single turn. Or the over-exaggerated effects like a full-screen camera shake or flashing during disasters, which will be the first things you turn off only to discover they never completely go away.

 

Then there's its failures as a strategy game, like over-dependence on randomization making even D&D seem reasonable by comparison. Or monsters spawning on a particular tile but getting infinite-range attacks eliminating the relevance of positioning. Or upgraded buildings losing their lower tier's active ability or leader ability for no logical reason.

 

But the straw which finally broke this camel's back was the screenshot above, reaching the end of a mission and not being permitted to leave. I assumed it was because I hadn't finished an objective. Reload and try again, exhaust the damn reservoir, count my turns carefully for a dash to the exit, only to discover myself still blocked, with zero explanation for why exactly it won't accept my order to move onto the exit tunnel square. Do I need to be a turn early, do I need to discover something else on the map, do I need some upgrade? Fuck it. I just stopped caring. One more for the Bozo pile.