Wildermyth
Don't be fooled by the cheap papercraft aesthetic, wildermyth is a fantastic game. It's a RPG with a XCOM-like turned based battles. It's labelled as procedurally generated story telling RPG but I don't know what that means. The story builds on the choices you make and it is more extensive than I expected. Characters age and have romances, rivalries, and offspring and will be changed by random events.
I had a character join my party. She was the daughter of my mage. As a warrior she fought with a spear and quickly learned an X-COM overwatch like ability where she could wait in ambush for monsters. As an offensive warrior she paired well with my other, defense orientated fighter. In one battle she spotted a fire spirit and chased it down. The fire spirit gave her a fire spear, which would set enemies on fire and cause an area effect explosion on successful hits.
Later, while exploring a new area of the map we came upon a strange monolith in the forest; two columns of stone with a fire burning between. The other party members thought it was too hot to approach but this fighter only thought it felt warm. She started saying weird things like "Can you hear the stories?" and I was told a story about the sky falling in love with a squirrel and the sky trying to build a tree for it's new lover but incinerating it instead. Afterwards I was presented with the option of letting her stick her arm into the flame. I thought I'd chosen poorly when she started to scream and caught on fire, but then she said it was OK. She gained the ability to shoot fireballs from her hands.
The writing is often strange and full of non-sequiturs. The dreamy quality makes me wonder if it was partially written by an GPT text generator but it could just be lazy writing. This is a shame because if someone could figure out how to hook a generative text engine to a game like this, or even just use a generative text engine to make your procedural game 10-20 times bigger and stranger than everything else, it would blow everything else out of the water.
I've put 9 hours into the game and just started the second campaign (out of 11). It remains to be seen how redundant the game play becomes but so far I haven't seen any repeated events. I think the events are written by the developer and not procedurally generated so the biggest flaw will be how often it repeats itself.
I haven't seen any repetition and the battles are interesting. Your characters level often enough it's exciting to go return to battle and try out their new abilities. I would like to see more classes. Each of the three classes can focus on different things, but it would still be nice to have more variety. Recommended.
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