Game file / ROGUE BY ROGUEWildermyth
Wildermyth follows heroes over their whole careers, from their pitchfork days to their powerful primes, and on into old age and memory. It’s a party-based procedural storytelling RPG where tactical combat and story decisions will alter your world and reshape your cast of characters.
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Video reviews
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Community discussion
A party-based tactical RPG from Worldwalker Games that procedurally stitches handcrafted story events into the lifelong tales of your heroes, who age, bond, get maimed and can return as legacy characters across campaigns.
Wildermyth is received as a critical and player darling: Metacritic 86 from critics, Steam 'Very Positive' at about 94.6% of roughly 18k reviews, and a cluster of 90 scores from PC Gamer, IGN, Edge and Metro GameCentral (Guardian 100, Game Informer 88). It is better known as a story generator with light tactics than as a classic roguelike; Steam tags include Rogue-lite but the structure is campaign chapters plus a legacy system. Its main weakness is repetition: once a player has seen the finite pool of events and narration, the magic fades, and a minority find the prose purple or the combat shallow. Active development ended in May 2024 with the Omenroad expansion (which adds a node-map roguelike challenge mode); console ports followed in October 2024. Some long-time fans wish it were still getting content.
What players praise
- Heroes have real lifespans: they age, fall in love, form rivalries, get injured or transformed (lost limbs replaced by wooden or stone parts, wolf or ghost forms), retire or die, producing memorable personal stories
- Handcrafted events are assembled procedurally around each character's traits and relationships, so the same scene plays differently for different casts
- The legacy system lets favorite heroes return in later campaigns and build a personal pantheon
- Papercraft / storybook art style and atmospheric soundtrack are widely called charming and cozy
- Tactical combat is approachable but has depth: class and ability stacking, and an environment-based mystic magic system that players single out as clever
- Excellent co-op (online and LAN); groups voice their characters and treat it like a tabletop RPG session
- Flexible difficulty and campaign length (a run can be finished in a couple of sittings), plus an easy pick-up-and-put-down rhythm
- Steam Workshop modding and a level editor; Omenroad gets praise from longtime fans for its lore-rich campaign
- Top Steam reviews repeatedly call it a favorite-of-all-time for readers: the writing and quiet emotional story beats land hard (e.g. lines about never daring to write one's own stories)
What players criticize
- Event and narration pool is finite, so duplicates appear quickly and replay value erodes after roughly 15-20 hours for some players
- Prose can feel over-flourished, metaphor-heavy and clunky; several reviewers say every character ends up sounding like the same poetic voice
- Procedural events often have little lasting consequence, so choices can feel cosmetic
- Combat is simple and repetitive for some, and late-chapter enemy spikes can feel unfair
- Escape-the-map objectives with endless enemy spawns can be punishing depending on where the party stands when they trigger
- Random dialogue between fights can feel like spam when you just want to play
- Omenroad DLC sits at only 'Mostly Positive' (72% of ~170 reviews) on Steam, versus 'Very Positive' for the base game
Distinctive features
- Treats the party's entire lifespan as the core loop: youth, prime, old age, memory, then legacy, unlike most roguelikes that focus on one run
- Procedural storytelling assembled from authored fragments driven by character traits and relationships
- No item inventory: gear picked up stays with the hero until replaced, which speeds pacing
- Environmental magic where the mystic class manipulates terrain, plants and light in battle
- Story-first, low-stress roguelite structure that is closer to a tabletop RPG than an XCOM-style permadeath grind, with LAN and online co-op
- Omenroad adds a node-map roguelike gauntlet mode on top of the story campaigns
Divided opinions
- Writing quality: critics and many fans call it witty and moving, while other players find it clunky and over-written
- Procedural vs authored story: some find the emergent character tales magical, others feel RNG makes everything pointless
- Combat depth: praised as approachable and clever, but criticised as shallow or repetitive
- Replayability: hundreds of hours for some (players above 750 and 1,400 hours), a 'play for a week then leave' game for others
Repetition and friction
- Clicking through a large volume of dialogue and narration (one reviewer put it at around 60% of the game)
- The slow campaign map where you watch time tick while tasks complete
- Seeing the same events again and again after many hours
- Procedurally recombined story that some players feel is an RNG remix rather than a human-written yarn, making events feel pointless
- Endless-spawn escape objectives late in chapters (top negative Steam review theme)
Hoped-for improvements
- Add many more events, dialogue variants and campaigns so repeat playthroughs stay fresh (a common wish given that active development ended in 2024)
- Option to skip or reduce narration and cutscene text, or tone the prose down
- Warn or confirm before clicking an empty tile or mis-targeting an attack (a mis-click complaint from a reviewer; there is also a user report that the hide-enemy-popup hides range info)
- Make story choices carry more visible campaign consequences
- More language support: Italian and French are repeatedly requested in Steam forum threads
- Rework the campaign pressure systems, such as escalating danger and legacy points, which some players dislike
Early Access began Nov 14, 2019; full 1.0 release Jun 15, 2021 on Windows, macOS and Linux (Steam, GOG, Epic, itch). It drew Golden Joystick nominations (Ultimate Game of the Year, Best Indie Game, Best Storytelling) and a D.I.C.E. nomination. Metacritic lists the critic score as 86 (Steam store page also shows 86) from 23-26 critics with no negative reviews; user score of 7.5 from 117 ratings is lower than Steam sentiment, with more complaints about shallow combat and repetition. Steam's own estimate put owners at roughly 1-2 million; steam-revenue-calculator.com estimates about $19.4M gross and $5.7M net, a Boxleiter-style order-of-magnitude figure, not audited. Active development concluded May 24, 2024 with the Omenroad expansion; PlayStation, Xbox and Switch versions launched Oct 22, 2024. Price $24.99. Recent Steam reviews remain Very Positive (about 88% in a 30-day sample on the store page I read). OpenCritic score could not be retrieved: web search quota was exhausted and guessed OpenCritic IDs returned other games, so it is reported as null.
Community sources
- Top helpful positive and negative English Steam reviews (local file) ↗
- Local Steam metadata: 94.6% positive of 18,286 reviews, Metacritic 86, tags, SteamSpy owners, revenue estimate ↗
- Metascore 86 and user score 7.5 with praise/criticism themes ↗
- Per-outlet critic scores (Guardian 100, PC Gamer/IGN/Edge 90, Game Informer 88) ↗
- Development timeline, Early Access, console release, award nominations, end of active development ↗
- Steam store page: review summaries, user tags, DLC list ↗
- Omenroad DLC content and Mostly Positive reception ↗
- Steam forum topics: language requests, UI confusion, mechanic questions ↗
- Official site: game description, platforms, DLC ↗
- Estimated revenue (Boxleiter-method estimate) ↗
Archived creator commentary 1
Third-party summaries based on automatic captions may contain transcription or interpretation errors.
Tier list Part 1 (2023)
Wildermyth is a turn-based tactics game on a board, with Fire Emblem-style play and a heavy emphasis on story, characters and relationships. He was recommended it by a trusted friend but it did not stick for him because it felt a bit slow. He acknowledges it is likely a solid game for people who click with it and could see himself returning to it and loving it. For now he places it low in B tier.
What the creator praises
- Strong focus on narrative, decisions and branching scenarios
- Characters you meet have relationships with your party, and you can choose whether a new character becomes a partner or best friend
- Fire Emblem-like turn-based tactics on a board
- Board-game-like look of 2D sprites on a 3D environment, which he finds all right
- Recommended by a friend who loved it; he can imagine it being really solid for those who stick with it
Issues raised by the creator
- It felt a little slow to him
- The game did not stick with him personally
- Art style is divisive; he is lukewarm on it
Design observations
- Story and character relationships are the core focus, with player choice over relationship types
- 2D sprites on a 3D tabletop-style environment
Updated opinion
He suggests he might revisit and rank it higher after giving it more time.
