Tactical RPG Wildermyth is the video game miracle of 2021

Ken Levine, videogame director, launched the game Ken Levine’s year-old company. BioShock infiniteIrrational Games, his studio was closed. It is a common occurrence for the video game industry to become a complete disaster. There are few financial opportunities for survival, and there have been many successes.

Levine and only a few of his collaborators would survive, but many others were left without jobs. Levine gave an hour-long presentation at the 2014 Game Developers Conference on the progress of his project a month following the closing. It wasn’tHe called it a game and emphasized this fact with a smile, suggesting that someone would mistakenly misrepresent him. The project would be an experiment testing Levine’s grand hypothesis: Fundamental changes to how we tell stories could make every player’s experience unique.

Videogame stories won’t have to be the same story structure as television or films.

Levine outlined a basic framework that video games could use to generate procedurally generated stories. Rather than following paths predetermined by the game maker, players and games would collaborate on story together, each reacting to the other’s choices. Imagine a Dungeon Master running a D&D campaign, but instead of a human steering your tabletop adventure, an artificial intelligence (or one hell of a spreadsheet) would respond to your choices.

Worldwalker Games

Levine’s speech was followed by a relatively calm company. Ghost Story Games took over what was left of Irrational Games in 2017. Since then the team appears to be picking at narrative Legos. However, no previews, interviews or leaks have occurred.

Then, in June of this year, with little fanfare, a brilliant “narrative Legos”-style game debuted on Steam. It was not connected to Ghost Story Games or Levine. It did not have the same financial backing from any mega-publisher. The studio never shipped any games.

Wildermyth Worldwalker Games in Austin, Texas, created it. Their website states that they each have 20 years experience in the industry, which seems a bit excessive when you take into account that this averages out to three years for each of their six employees.

This game blends two genres, a visual novel and a tactical RPG. A trio of heroes are created and sent on an adventure across the map. The maps is divided into cities, hills, valleys and caves. There are also lakes and oceans. The game will show you directions and a comic-book panel when you approach an area. Your choices can result in rewards, punishments, or some combination of both. For example, early in one adventure, one of my characters — prone to bad choices — touched a cursed jewel, causing the purple gem to embed itself in her eye socket. As the game went on, however, she was unable to stop the rock from taking over her body. It made her slower and also turned her arms into deadly, polished blades.

Worldwalker Games

She made great use of her new death appendages in the game’s brawls – until she died. She was one of many to fall to the blade of some lovecraftian ghoul or demonic automaton in later adventures, and those who survived couldn’t outrun the greatest killer of all: time. The characters grow up, often partnering with fellow adventurers and strangers along the journey. Sometimes, they even have the opportunity to give birth, so that the next generation of adventurers can continue the story until their lineage is threatened by poor strategic choices made in battle with unknown forces.

The lethality of the narrative might surprise you if you’re going off the game’s cute art direction and simplistic action. The characters look like little paper dolls and hop across the gridded terrain, villages, caverns, or enemy territory. They hide behind furniture, and they hurl attacks at others by wobbling around in their place. You have to be creative in order to meet it halfway.

But if you commit, there’s more depth here than meets the eye. The story has a significant impact on the combat and vice-versa. For example, one of my spellcasters spent his journey learning how to master their relationship with the natural world, turning every map’s bushes into deathtraps and missiles. A meeting in darkness at night gave them mysterious abilities that were the result of a divine touch from the cosmos.

Worldwalker Games

All of the individual pieces — the comic book sequences, the map trotting, the dungeon crawling — flatter one another, so that my decisions, whether as to where we travel next or who risks their life against a particularly scary boss, created a ripple effect across my story.

It is amazing that such a small group created an incredible work of art. One that goes beyond studios or teams with 10x, 100, even 100x their budgets. But perhaps it’s because of this scale that this game could happen. This is how it works when teams have to prioritise every decision. There are no fancy animations. There are no animated cut-scenes. Shareholders are not to be satisfied with financial success.

They have no previous experience in the industry, which is known for abuse, burnout and creativity malaise. Wildermyth lacked the historical baggage of peers who’ve spent their careers hearing the words, “That sounds cool — maybe next time.”

It is my only wish that the game will continue to be loved by its intended audience. I don’t want this to be another story of a critically acclaimed game appearing in the world, only for the studio to disappear a year later. The only thing that is more thrilling than this? WildermythIt is the next step of its creators.