I've only just started playing this game but I've been through the first two campaigns, and after being hit a bit emotionally on the second with real attachment to my characters, I felt compelled to add my voice to the heaps of good reviews out there. This is a fantastic game, with elements of all of the things I really enjoy about RPG, tabletop gaming, open world, and fantasy. I use open world a bit freely here, but it still scratches an itch for me in that I don't typically enjoy linear games that force you down a direct path quite as much.

Others have pretty much covered all the stuff that's good about it. I'm a really picky gamer and I'll circle a game for a while before pulling the trigger, making sure it'll be worth my while to learn the game and become good enough to enjoy it. So if you're fussy like me, and you don't like to have a huge learning curve, you will probably enjoy this if all the other boxes are ticked for you.

The only thing I would change is perhaps the music because it does get a bit repetitive on longer playing sessions especially.

I have three huge compliments to pay to this game and its creator:

1) The writing is fantastic, from the individual dialogues all the way up to the macro of the main campaigns, the random miniquests, and how the plot points come together seamlessly.

2) The pacing is unreal, especially when you realize that a hallmark of this game is randomization. The characters and plot build in tandem over the course of each campaign from untested adventurers to trustworthy heroes, sometimes even living legends. (The reintroduction of old characters from previous campaigns both as "reborn" PCs and ally NPCs is a fantastic touch and gives the characters a mythical feeling). The best part is that none of this ever feels rushed or a slog.

3) I didn't expect to care much about randomized PCs, but after just a few encounters I'm wholly invested in every new face. This is mostly a result of the writing and pacing that I mentioned before, but it's worth a separate shout out for just how real these characters and their lives feel. You get to follow them for their entire adventuring careers until they die, retire, or accomplish the feat that called them to adventure when they were young.

The combat gameplay is simple but tight, engaging, and enjoyable. However, the real reason this game shines are the RPG mechanics. It's worth buying at full price.

I'm not sure what version of Wildermyth I'm playing, because everyone tells me this game is amazing. And yet... progression is painfully slow. There are only three classes of hero. The tilesets are repetitive, and all are completely flat. Upgrades to equipment don't provide any incentive to change how you play the game, they are just small stat boosts. And speaking of the gameplay loop, it's simplistic and consists of killing everything on the map using a couple of abilities, over and over again. And let's be clear. Simplistic "clear the bad guys" missions can be loads of fun in many games, like X-COM. I just didn't find the gameplay compelling in this one - it's been done in far more interesting ways by other games you could be playing right now.

In terms of mission variety, there seem to be only two kinds of missions. In the first kind, enemies are activated in small pods and are trivially easy to kill without taking damage. In the second kind of mission, which is rare, all enemies on the map start activated and within close range of your heroes, guaranteeing your party's deaths and overwhelming any kind of damage mitigation or kiting you can perform. From posts which I only found after playing the game for a bit, it appears that these tend to happen most often at the end of a campaign, resulting in a TPK after you've spent hours developing your party.

There are small story vignettes sprinkled across the campaign which are nice, but the overarching stories are simplistic and the story vignettes have no relation to each other or the overarching story. You're left to fill in a lot of the blanks yourself, which is fine I guess. But, the combat is uninspiring, progression fails to give any cause for excitement, and the game is plodding. I don't have a lot of time to play games each day any more, and this one simply isn't compelling.