I ran across Wildermyth a couple weeks back on Steam, and seeing the great reviews and the overall concept of the game, I was interested. Then, I found out my sister owned the game – upon asking her, she highly recommended it.

I’ve been itching for a stat-based storytelling RPG lately, and it just released from Early Access about 8 days ago. It was still on release sale at the time, so I picked it up.

Over the past weekend, Vix and Xaa have been playing Wildermyth together – yes, it has multiplayer on Steam – and when I commented that I’d not played it but was interested in the multiplayer, they invited me in for a game.

Hosting and playing with others on Steam is a fairly simple thing. One person moves the story forward while the others can opt to follow the leader as they click through the dialogue. You assign characters to specific players for battle.

Battle itself is a turn-based strategy. If you play by yourself, you control all the characters, but having more players involved makes it interesting… since everyone has their own ideas of strategy.

I played through the first chapter almost twice – we restarted when Syn came to join us – and the stories were different both times, aside from the base foundational narration at the beginning.

Wildermyth is very well written – it’s like playing an interactive story/comic book. It’s a joy to watch the characters interact based on the personality traits you’ve chosen for them and their relationships with others.

This game also doesn’t hold back on maiming and altering your characters based on your choices. In our first game, our mage, Merlin, ended up with a peg leg for having to retreat from a battle scenario. Later on, he was blessed by an earth elemental and that peg leg turned into something very different…

In our second campaign, our newly-recruited warrior, Mr. Sensitive, ended up getting himself into quite a bind due to his misplaced curiosity.

As a matter of fact, by the end of the first chapter of our second campaign, my character was the only one who hadn’t ended up with some strange transformation. These seem to come with positives and negatives, but are overall amazing trophies of the adventures and struggles the characters have gone through.

There’s a lot more to this game – scouting and protecting territories – finding and distributing loot – those sorts of things. But the heart of this game is stories and the adventurers who take part in them. Whether playing alone or with friends, this game has a lot to offer. And since it’s only just released, I can only see more adventure ahead!

I wholehearted hope to support the future development of this little gem. So, if it’s the kind of game that catches your eye, give it a shot!