Wildermyth is a fantasy roleplaying tactics game and one of my favorite games I have ever played. The game uses an effective combination of procedural events and player decisions to create a mythmaking engine on par with tabletop roleplaying games in terms of customization and organic storytelling. Now with the Omenroad DLC, Wildermyth takes those same basic tools – procedural generation and player choice – and pivots them into a recognizable structure (the roguelike) with a greater combat focus to create a challenge mode for players more interested in the tactical battles. While many of Wildermyth’s familiar components are present, they are restructured to create a new experience that – while not breaking new ground in terms of roguelike systems – serves as a fun alternative to the vanilla experience of Wildermyth. These first impressions will be specifically focused on the challenge mode of Omenroad; I’ll have an article sometime in the future on the campaign mode, but so far I have not played it.
The Omenroad challenge takes place over three “pages,” maps with a series of nodes that include a mix of combat scenarios, resting places, and rewards such as resource harvesting opportunities, treasure chests with equipment, and blacksmiths for upgrading gear. You move from one node to the next, resolving the scenario therein until you reach the page boss. Defeating the boss proceeds to the next page, and finishing the boss of the third page gives you an Omenroad victory. Most nodes involve fights against one of four different monster groups – like most of the story campaigns, there will always be one monster group that isn’t in play during your Omenroad run. Certain nodes offer more difficult combat scenarios (referred to as “hard fights”) in exchange for more powerful or more plentiful rewards. In addition to the rewards I described above that aren’t attached to combat, battles can also give transformations, tails, bonus abilities, or combat buffs that last for the length of the page.
In terms of difficulty, there are some differences from the base game while some elements remain the same. Instead of choosing from adventurer, tragic hero, walking lunch, etc. for your difficulty settings, you choose a numbered peril rating, with higher ratings unlocked by beating runs. You start with four characters to play with and can upgrade them with “odes,” meta-rewards you can purchase with the renown earned from your omenroad adventures. At the initial peril rating, combat nodes will feature only a couple of monster cards without upgrades. But just like in the base game, calamities will occur after every battle that make monsters stronger. The calamities are kind of a cross between the two different ways you accrue calamities in the base game. They happen after every battle, but instead of one guaranteed calamity you get four to eight different calamities (depending on your progress) and can pick one of them to cancel out. This no longer costs legacy points but that means you now can no longer horde points to cancel all the bad calamities later. Another thing that works the same in Omenroad is hitting zero HP – party members who hit zero HP the first time can die if you want, but they can also take a stat penalty to survive once per page. You have to lose everybody in a single battle in order to actually game over, which in a way makes this a bit easier than other roguelikes where mistakes are pretty final.
Easier but not necessarily easy – I definitely had some near-misses when it came to characters dying!
The basics are pretty straightforward. Choose one of the nodes available to you, fight the battle if there is one, and reap the rewards. Oh, but I should say: reaping the rewards is often not as simple as just winning the fight. Most rewards appear in chests or shrines and must be claimed during combat within a certain amount of turns. If you don’t make it to a chest or shrine in time, it disappears along with all the advantages it offered. During node battles if you can manage to clear the enemies fast enough, you can then spend your remaining turns trying to open chests or catch spirits or what have you. During boss battles, the map ends as soon as you kill the boss, so you have to pick up your rewards mid-combat or sacrifice them entirely. Like most roguelikes the greater the risks you take, the greater the rewards you earn, better enabling you to take on the more difficult challenges down the line. And just like the base game (and most roguelikes), the tools you receive to help you reach victory are different each playthrough, challenging you to adapt to the circumstances that the game gives you and be comfortable with a variety of playstyles.
Combat plays out similarly to in the base game. Battles take place on a grid battlefield on one of a large selection of maps populated with enemies and with objects that serve as cover and as tools for magical interfusion. During your turn you move your characters in whatever order you wish, placing them and taking actions in order to meet the combat objective. A lot of objectives involve killing all the enemies but my run had a decent mix of other objectives, primarily survival and escape along with the occasional “destroy X scenery” objective. In addition to the treasure chests and shrines, there are a couple of new mechanics added in. Some enemies will have experience points floating above their heads – defeating these enemies instantly gives that XP to the winning character, which can cause them to level up mid-battle (previously not possible in Wildermyth). This is particularly useful for helping characters like mystics who have a slower XP curve to stay current with their other party members. The other new mechanic is the golden shield, a boss-exclusive buff that basically places a cap on the amount of damage you can do in a single turn. This keeps you from one-rounding bosses – you have to factor in that they will be around for a couple of turns and have opportunities to use their abilities. Particularly strong bosses may have multiple golden shields to break through. It’s an interesting way to force you to strategize during those fights, as in the base game the most effective strategy is often to ignore all the enemies supporting the boss and just throw all your characters at the boss to kill them in a single turn.
Now all that describes how Omenroad works, but how does it feel to play? That part is more subjective, of course, but I think generally if you like Wildermyth’s combat and like the idea of a mode that focuses on that combat more than the story then Omenroad will probably be satisfying for you. The initial difficulty is very manageable for an experienced Wildermyth player while still offering a bit of friction; I had characters maimed three different times in my first run and was definitely nervous about losing at least one character permanently at a couple points. The golden shields make the boss fights more challenging, the time limits on chests and shrines add an important consideration to battles that makes strategizing more interesting, and it’s fun to consider game elements like transformations and relationships for their more mechanical functions.
The new gear from Omenroad and the armor from the Armor and Skins DLC all look great; the character designs from my first run look sick as hell
The star of my first run was a warrior named Lonanna Siltwood, who early on gained access to paladin, vigilance, and sentinel to make her an enemy-phase powerhouse. She also was the first hero to gain an artifact weapon, the brand-new Dreadscythe. This weapon gives a weakened version of broadswipes to the unit for free as well as increases stunt damage. I had her develop multiple rivalries so that she could take advantage of that boosted stunt damage more often. She also got to transform her head into a frog head later in the run, enabling her to use her tongue to pull enemies closer so she could take advantage of broadswipes or position them for allies to be able to make their attacks. Both of my hunters ended up getting ember arrows as one of their initial abilities, so I taught my mystic ignite to combo with them. Once he got ignite+, I could burn an enemy, yank the fire closer to my hunters while damaging one or two more enemies, then position my hunters around the fire to deal increased damage and shred armor on one or two additional foes. I also found that the map variety was pretty solid, so while I didn’t have fire naturally on every single map, many had options for me to work with so it didn’t feel like building around a specific infusion source was a detriment for me.
Figuring out a new strategy for prioritizing resources was interesting. Normally in vanilla Wildermyth I would clear each area on the overworld and make sure to take my time building up structures so I could get the maximum number of gear pieces as well as crafting materials. In Omenroad, you are often choosing between crafting materials, a couple of pieces of gear, or something like a combat buff or an ability upgrade. Generally when I started a page, I would look at where the hard fights were located and make a decision by prioritizing routes that allowed me to get as many hard fights as possible. Not only do hard fights typically have more rewards, but usually better ones too. Everyone in my party except for my hunters had artifact weapons by the end of the run, for example, and my warriors each had two different artifact weapons to switch between depending on the situation. I didn’t mess too much with transformations, partly because I didn’t get ones I particularly liked but also because I didn’t fully understand how they worked. You can use legacy points at a transformation shrine to buy multiple steps of a transformation at once, allowing you to instantly unlock the more powerful offensive abilities of things like the celestial or the botanical; that would have changed my strategy to be less artifact and crafting material focused and instead angling more towards free ability upgrades so I could get the strongest versions of the special abilities.
Overall, I’m enjoying Omenroad so far and I am excited to see what future runs will bring. As someone who likes the mechanical aspects of Wildermyth, this mode gives me an opportunity to carve them out and really focus on them. Omenroad feels like such a natural fit with what Wildermyth already does – the fundamental components of a roguelike were there already, it was just a matter of shifting the game’s structure to fit a more traditional vision of what that looks like. Not every Wildermyth player will be drawn to it, and I would hesitate to say at this point that I prefer it, but I think it’s a great way to refresh the experience by arranging the components in a new to create a unique but comparable experience – like changing up your weekly taco night to be a nacho night instead. The fundamental ingredients are the same but there’s enough of a shift in the foundational structure to revitalize the experience and make it feel different. In the future, I look forward to experiencing the meta layer components like playing on higher levels of peril as well as introducing odes to the mix. And I’m excited to see the fully authored story of the new campaign, A Walk in the Unlight, which takes everything I just talked about in terms of mechanical changes and adds to it the writing which so defined Wildermyth for the majority of the players. I hope to have articles for these in the coming weeks. For now, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Omenroad DLC if you’re playing it!