A couple of weeks ago I shared my initial thoughts on Wildermyth’s Omenroad DLC, specifically the game’s roguelike challenge mode. Since that time I have gone through and played through the second big piece of the DLC: a brand new story campaign using the Omenroad mechanics called A Walk in the Unlight. Since the release of the DLC, it has been announced that this will be the final one. Worldwalker Games, the indie developer behind Wildermyth, is preparing to enter a period of hibernation. Outside of bug fixes and promised updates like a console release, the game is complete, and no new major content will be added. Given that the game has seven authored story campaigns as well as a rich system for creating procedurally generated stories and combat scenarios in two different styles of play, I think it’s reasonable for the team to say that its time to wind things down.
A Walk in the Unlight certainly feels like a campaign created by a team saying goodbye to their work at long last. It is both literally and thematically a walk through all of the stories that Wildermyth has told throughout the years. In a game about the legacy and the myths that you create as a player, ending on a story that reflects upon them all feels appropriate. It is, like most Wildermyth stories, a tale about ordinary people and extraordinary circumstances, the choices that thrust them into the annals of history and whether or not those choices were the right ones to make. It is also a love story, a tale of desires and promises, and what those things mean in a world where they take mythic forms.
In this article I will be reviewing A Walk in the Unlight as a single campaign experience. I’ll focus first on broad strokes with minimal spoilers and talk about things like the campaign structure and mechanical aspects of the experience. Once all that’s done I’ll get around to the story. This will include more detailed spoilers which will be marked. Note that this isn’t a full Wildermyth review nor is it a review of the full content of Omenroad, so things like the other game modes nor stuff like graphics that you might expect in a full game review will be here. I’ve written plenty about Wildermyth over the years though, if you’re looking for that sort of thing.
Premise and Structure
Most Wildermyth campaigns tell the tale of a group of ordinary people who rise to mythic circumstances. Monsters attack their small village and they rise to meet them, building their legend over time until a final epic confrontation in a conflict lasting decades. A Walk in the Unlight begins at the climactic moment of one such story – but with the crew that gets left behind. There’s some fun fourth wall play here that’s acknowledging the mechanics of the game. You can only take five heroes into the final battle of any given campaign. A Walk in the Unlight focuses on the heroes who were left behind while their five companions charged into the final battle: one a legacy hero of your choosing and the other a brand new recruit they were training. The new recruit functions as the main character of the campaign; it is because they are left behind that they are in position to start their own adventure.
The heroes are invited to the castle of a dragon by the name of Glyffrix to dance at his Neverbefore Ball. This Neverbefore Ball takes place in Nitherfaruwen, known in the language of Yondering as Netherflare. Netherflare is a new world in the setting of Wildermyth, a strange and magical land where desire and oaths are intertwined in the very physics of the world; what you want shapes your path forward through the world, and what you promise binds you as firmly as gravity binds you to the ground. To get to the Neverbefore Ball, the heroes will need a guide who knows the secrets of navigating Netherflare. Joined by their guide Elthiar, the heroes make the way through Netherflare to the castle of Glyffrix and through a series of magical circumstances also find themselves journeying through the other campaigns of Wildermyth.
Structurally this plays out somewhat similarly to a typical Omenroad run, but with a few alterations. Like in Omenroad the campaign takes place over the course of three pages each consisting of a series of nodes. Nodes indicate the type of encounter or event which will take place; the first major difference from Omenroad is that some nodes are scripted story events rather than a simple enemy encounter. Story nodes have set dialogue and authored combat encounters, which makes them distinct from the more traditional Omenroad nodes where the enemy type you are dealing with and the rewards from fighting them are procedurally generated. There are sections of these more traditional types of nodes in between story nodes in A Walk in the Unlight, but the inclusion of story nodes makes the overall experience feel like something sort of in-between the normal Wildermyth experience and the Omenroad mode.
Mechanics
With the exception of the story nodes, A Walk in the Unlight is functionally an Omenroad run. This means that many mechanics that were introduced in Omenroad are present here. While story nodes have their own rewards, more traditional nodes have rewards like ability or relationship shrines, gear or resource chests, or combat buffs that improve your characters. These rewards are collected mid-battle by fighting to position your characters near the chest or shrine containing them. You gain experience points post-battle but certain enemies grant bonus experience mid-battle for defeating them. Bosses have golden shields that put a hard cap on how much damage you can deal them per turn, forcing you to strategize around taking multiple rounds of combat to defeat them.
Story node combat scenarios are more authored, which often means they have unique goals compared to the random battles as well as unique characters to play with. The most consistent unique character is Elthiar, who plays sort of like a hunter/mystic hybrid with a bow that deals magic damage by firing arrows from interfused objects in the environment. She is in your party the majority of the campaign. Other story battles feature one-off guests, some of whom are more traditional Wildermyth characters while others are playable monsters. I enjoyed these situations more than I did the “play as the drauven” scenario in All the Bones of Summer because you always have your core team in the fight too, so you never are solely reliant on the temporary monster characters.
In terms of combat objectives, some of the story nodes include goals like surviving for a certain number of turns, clearing a specific set of tiles of enemies, destroying a certain number of objects in the environment, or safely escorting an NPC to an escape zone. Some of these objectives also come with individual battle mechanics that add an interesting wrinkle to the battle; one survival scenario for example gives your characters a one-off wooden barricade they can build to establish cover or set up an interfusion. These sorts of touches help to set the campaign apart from a normal Omenroad run. Also unique compared to a typical Omenroad run is that your characters have to survive for story reasons, which means you game over if someone dies. However, you can also save in the campaign whereas you cannot in Omenroad, making it easier to roll back if you encounter a scenario that is simply too difficult to navigate because of a previous mistake.
Story Spoilers
What makes any given campaign truly stand out is the story it tells. Wildermyth has beautiful writing that in its style and tone brings to mind great epics, and each story deals with different themes in the form of a different monster group. The Deepists being a cult, for example, allows that campaign to tell a tale which focuses on people leaving or joining that cult; the thrixl deal in dreams, illusions, and a fey parallel reality that features heavily in their story. A Walk in the Unlight is about desire, promises, and memories – much of the drama of the story centers on Elthiar, the party’s mysterious guide through Nitherfaruwen, and the relationship that the new recruit in your party forms with her over the course of their journey.
*major story spoilers beyond this point – skip them by clicking here*
What makes Elthiar a compelling character is what also makes her a potent guide in Netherflare. The paths through Netherflare respond to desire – if the one walking has a clear desire, that desire molds the path before them to lead them where they wish to go. Those without that crystal clear vision of their desires are lost. Elthiar’s tragic past planted in her desire for power, independence, and freedom – three aspects of her person that a thrixl conspirator called Theevaleen uses against her to trap her in a mind prison and give her an ultimatum: stay inside the mind prison forever, or get her freedom back in exchange for opening a path to kill Glyffrix the dragon. Elthiar chooses to betray her lord and master in exchange for her freedom, just as she once betrayed the goddess Oruwe with whom Theevaleen claims to be in love.
This sets up a scenario where the player knows Elthiar is conspiring a betrayal but the characters do not know. How you play your main character and their relationship to Elthiar is all a part of the drama. I chose to portray my hero, a red-headed young woman named Dayyel, as finding a kindred spirit in Elthiar and slowly falling in love with her. Dayyel too desired the freedom and independence she saw in Elthiar. So I chose to trust when trust was inadvisable, but was ultimately rewarded by the third act turn. Elthiar’s betrayal was anticipated and calculated by Glyffrix, who had his own scheme in place to return Theevaleen to the side of Oruwe while also saving his own life in the process. The Neverbefore Ball was a dance of death, a mighty battle inviting mythic heroes from all across time to stand against Theevaleen and protect Glyffrix until the goddess returned to take what was hers. Once the dust settles, your hero makes their choice regarding whether to stay in Netherflare or return home, and whether or not Elthiar is involved in that equation.
In the midst of all that business the heroes are crossing in and out of mysterious phenomena called aumaries. These are memories of the goddess, alternate realities or histories where stories endlessly play out in a cycle. These aumaries take you through many events of other major campaigns, as well as stories that aren’t even part of Wildermyth’s story campaigns but nevertheless feel as if they could have been. One legacy character who ultimately joins you will be someone killed by Cvawn, the mighty dragon of All the Bones of Summer; another aumary will have you rescuing Eluna from Eluna and the Moth from the fated encounter that makes her a thrixl queen, instead delivering her to the crow witch to live out a life of peace. Revisiting these tales over the course of the campaign is a great way to remember your own adventures, contributing to the broader sense of reflection that gives A Walk in the Unlight some of its character.
Overall I found the story of A Walk in the Unlight to be quite compelling. It was cool to revisit the familiar characters and stories of the previous campaigns in a new way and truly felt like a fond farewell to Wildermyth as a whole. Beyond that, though, the tale of Elthiar and the situation she found herself caught up in between Oruwe, Theevaleen, and Grlyffrix was compelling to read and felt suitably mythic and strange for the new setting of Nitherfaruwen. Most of all, I found myself deeply impressed and charmed by the quality of the love story between the player character and Elthiar. Wildermyth’s love stories often emerge organically or are a strictly mechanical factor that don’t feature the sort of mythic romance one expects from fantasy tales of this style. A Walk in the Unlight gives us the opportunity to see what a truly authored love story from these developers can look like, and by the end of it I genuinely sat for minutes trying to make a decision about what conclusion felt most fitting for Dayyel and Elthiar.
Final Thoughts
A Walk in the Unlight is the perfect sendoff for Wildermyth. It captures many of the game’s best qualities: the poetic writing telling a tale of ordinary heroes thrust into the business of mythic figures like gods and dragons alongside solid tactical battles with deeply customizable characters. It brings in all the monsters from the major story campaigns to reflect on what the journey has been up to this point, all in the interest of telling one final tale that feels like a celebration of the legacy of the game. If you are someone who enjoys Wildermyth’s writing and has played all of the campaigns up to this point, I highly recommend A Walk in the Unlight. It’s a fantastic way to say goodbye to Worldwalker Games as they enter hibernation; I for one will be looking forward to whatever is next on their journey.