Wildermyth

This has truly been one of my all time favorite games that I can genuinely just get lost into for hours, I really enjoy everything from the art style, to the storytelling, and the combat system. Again, cannot recommend this game enough

Love it! Took a bit to get used to playing as mythical heroes, with multiverse storylines basically, but the game is an absolute 10/10. I played mod free for my first few runs and that was great, but the right mods have made the game even better!

X-COM: SEXUALITY UNKNOWN I grew up on turn-based tactical games. Ultima IV and V. The Gold Box. UFO: Enemy Unknown (or X-COM for the Americans in the audience). Looking back, I can't honestly say I loved the combat in any of them. The original X-COM remains one of the most terrifying games I've ever played because the baseline jeopardy was nuclear. Every unexplored room might contain a Sectoid with a lucky reaction shot. The Gold Box games faithfully imported AD&D's habit of letting specific monsters kill you outright on a 20% dice roll. Once you'd learned the systems, combat became repetitive. Develop your routines. Learn the boss mechanics. Win. So why did I keep coming back? Two reasons: world-building and optimisation. Ultima had a genuinely novel world. The Gold Box games had the Forgotten Realms. X-COM's setting was minimal, but its tactical systems were a triumph particularly for power-gamers. The fun wasn't simply surviving, it was coming back with the knowledge to properly school those extraterrestrial mofos. Thirty years later, Wildermyth tries scratching that same itch. People rave about its emergent storytelling. I think that's giving it way too much credit. The campaigns themselves are remarkably slight: simple plots that march from beginning to end with a set of random mini plots bolted on. Whatever those mini plots are – disrupting a cult, romancing a nature spirit, foraging for breakfast ingredients to impress your gender-fluid half-brick life partner – you’ll have either two or three choices at the end. Think the shortest, most self-indulgent set of Fighting Fantasy adventures ever written. I read the first dozen or so in full out of courtesy. After that, skim-reading would be generous. And that’s just the first time. The same little pick-your-own vignettes are going to get served to you over and over again. So why do people have 300, 500 or even 1,000 hours in Wildermyth? Not because they're desperate to see the same campaign arc played out on a different map, or because they’re desperate to read a particular 10-frame comic strip for the 30th time. They're trying to breed the perfect hero. This hero has crow wings. That one lost an arm to a crystal infection. Another acquired a fox tail, a wolf head, bark skin and a magical prosthetic leg. Then they married someone with exactly the right legacy abilities, recruited a pet, inherited a unique transformation and accidentally created a ludicrous demigod capable of deleting entire encounters before the enemies have finished introducing themselves. That's the game. The story isn't the destination. It's the random event generator that occasionally rewards you with another absurdly powerful mutation. Along the way it's all packaged in a set of sensibilities that make most modern RPGs look Victorian. Same-sex parenting is entirely unremarkable. So is growing a wolf's head, sprouting incandescent legs and making babies with someone who’s 90% pot plant. It's less "inclusive fantasy" than "absolutely anything goes." If you've ever looked at X-COM and thought, "This needs fewer plasma rifles and more opportunities to selectively breed a dynasty of fox-tailed crow-people," congratulations. You've found your game.