After most of a year away from the game, I’ve returned to playing Wildermyth. My return from this extended absence was prompted by the group of people that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with on Fridays suggesting we play Wildermyth as a fun activity we could all do together. We even had one pleasant but incredibly late session of it, though we’ve since struggled to get together to continue playing. I suspect this will be a bit easier than scheduling a D&D session, on account of it taking less time to play in general and Wildermyth’s ability to be easily shortened or stretched to fit into whatever time we’ve got. I don’t expect us to play it weekly, by any means, but hopefully we’ll be able to return to the game we started before a full month has passed. Also, while waiting, I can continue to play by myself. It’s tons of fun to play in multiplayer mode, but still almost as fun to play in single player mode, so I’m beginning to slip it into my regular gaming rotation again. I’m also, once again, discovering that it is incredibly addicting to play and that it is incredibly easy for me to lose track of time while I’m playing it. I’ve already had a couple nights where I stayed up way too dang late to play it and I’ve only been back to playing it for a week as of writing this post.

The only reason I stopped playing it much is because I kind of burned out on it. I played it a lot last winter as an escape from the stress of my daily life (starting with family therapy sessions) and did my best to keep playing it since I gave it to a bunch of people as a Christmas present. I hit the point of having weird dreams based on the battles and gameplay of Wildermyth more than once during that period and wound up dropping the game for a while. Partly because of the weird dreams and hyperfixation on it and partly because I’d grown to associate it with the stressful winter nights of early 2023. I played it a couple times after that, usually in pretty small doses, but never for particularly long. I did a couple hangouts with a friend as we played the game and I think one longer session with two of my siblings, but that was probably it. I never even went back after the DLC was released, adding some new events armor types, since I was still trying to avoid losing myself in the game as much as I did last winter.

Plus, once The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out, I haven’t really had any time without a new game to play or without a prequel to beat before a sequel comes out. Even now, as I’m getting back into it, I can’t help but think of all the new games I should probably be playing instead of going through the randomly generated campaigns now that, in one long evening, I’ve beaten the final prewritten campaign. I still haven’t made much progress through Spider-Man 2 and I’ve still got plenty of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars to go before I’m finished with that game. Hell, I still haven’t beaten Armored Core VI. I was too stressed back when it came out and just never really buckled down to play through more than the first mission (which I really struggled with thanks to trying to fight super cautiously against the final boss, which is apparently Not The Way in Armored Core). So I’ve got a lot of games to play and not a lot of time to be playing them lately, on account of National Novel Writing Month, the holidays, and my general business.

Still, Wildermyth is enough fun that I can’t really resist going back to it. It’s always so straight-forward, so uncomplex, and it wraps everything up eventually in a satisfying if not always neat way. I’m not certain what the custom campaigns will look like (which is what is next up for me, unless the upcoming second wave of DLC includes some kind of new campaign and just so happens to arrive before I play the game again), but I’m interested to find out. I’ve got a ton of Legacy characters I’d like to keep using, to keep powering up through long campaigns so I can get more achievements and unlock more special themes for my various transformed characters. There’s still so much of this procedurally generated game left to discover and the only way to do that is to keep running through the campaigns until there’s no story bits left unexperienced!

I might be less enamored with the prose than I was when I first played the game (getting Shy and The Shadow in LITERALLY every campaign I’ve done since I first got it has left me somewhat irked with the repetition of the longer chunks of fiction strewn about the game), but I still really enjoy reading through them. I try to make sure I’ve got enough different types of characters so I can eventually experience all the Character Hooks and see a bunch of different dialog in my characters’ conversations, but I’ve played so many different characters over such a long time span that I just genuinely don’t remember. I could make a chart, to try to track what I’ve done in the past, but that’s a lot of work when I’ve got dozens of characters already, many of which have never been in a lot of scenes because they wound up being add-on characters I kept around to do stuff like build bridges or dig out mountain passes while my main squad actually did stuff in the world at large. It’s a bit late to be starting that now. I just hope that, maybe, there’ll eventually be a way to track that kind of stuff in-game for us completionists out there who want to see everything. Or, you know, as close to it as we can get.