Your Party in Wildermyth Are Kind of Assholes (and That's Great)
Video games are never quite going to feel like tabletop RPGs - as Rowan Kaiser points out in her review of Wildermyth for IGN, a computer is never going to have the flexibility of a human game master. What Wildermyth does have, though, is the feeling of improvisational chaos in its characters akin to a real-life D&D party. As I put it to a friend: they're all kind of assholes, right?
This isn't to say that your procedurally generated party in Wildermyth are antagonistic, or unpleasant. Instead, it's a combination of seeing their specific traits in play and some genre-savvy banter that never crosses the line into outright derision. As party dialogue plays across the screen underneath the narration text, it's reminiscent of interrupting your DM - just a bit! - to lampshade that a villain monologue is about to happen. At which point you still sit back and let the villain monologue happen, because that DM is your friend and D&D is a thing you play for fun.
More than just the feeling of playing with your friends around the table, this improvisational chaos makes Wildermyth more of a story generator and disincentivises 'optimised' play. In more videogame-feeling-videogames, you might think twice about picking up that obviously cursed object - if nothing else, it might affect your stats (and it still does, in Wildermyth.) That asshole in your party though? They have to know what happens!
Oh, Also
It's been a little while! Which means I've written a ton of drafts, put far too much pressure on myself to make the comeback newsletter a really good one, and not sent any of them.
In lieu of that, I'm fully just ending this one with a cat tweet and nothing else. Perfection is the enemy of good, and cat tweet is the enemy of unfinished newsletters.
https://twitter.com/catsplacess/status/1408230209510264834
Ruth Cassidy is a writer and self-described velcro cyborg who, when not writing about video games, is probably being emotional about musicals, mountains, or cats. Has had some bylines, in some places.