Permanence in Wildermyth

    Permanence is one of the scariest things that a video game can have. Part of the beauty of video games is that they offer players unlimited chances to make the right choice or do the right thing. Permanence takes unlimited opportunities to succeed away from players and instead forces them to focus on getting things right the first time. This pressure can cause a lot of stress and frustration on some players causing them to avoid games with such a mechanic altogether. However, Wildermyth (2021) is a game that takes permanence and makes it something very enjoyable and unique.

    The game does this in a few interesting ways. Overall, it is done through the choices that the player makes and how those choices affect the player characters. As with any turn-based tactics game, when characters die in Wildermyth the are permanently dead. Unlike other turn-based tactics games, Wildermyth allows players to make different choices about what happens to characters when their health reaches zero. These range from how the character dies, to even letting them escape death while taking on different debuffs. These debuffs go beyond just decreasing the character’s abilities or stats, they also change how the characters look. Perhaps a character will have an eye patch or a peg leg after escaping the battle. The point is, no matter what, the player is left with some permanent consequence for their character’s health reaching empty.

    Another way that Wildermyth embraces permanence is in the fact that player characters are constantly aging. Even if characters don’t end up dying or being maimed in combat, they will change as they age. Their hair will go grayer and their skin will get wrinklier. It is interesting because this permanent change in the player characters does a great job of showing how un-permanent the characters in the game are. This is because once the player characters reach a certain age, they end up retiring from the adventuring party, and the player will no longer have access to them during their current campaign.

    The last and most important way that changes to player characters are permanent in Wildermyth that I will discuss here is that the most interesting changes to characters in the game happen outside of combat. Through traversing and exploring procedurally generated world maps of the game, the player will come across procedurally generated story vignettes involving their characters. In these vignettes, players make choices on what their characters will do. The effects of which can be quite permanent. For example, I chose for one of my characters to touch a magical wall of fire, and suddenly they started turning into a fire being. As the years and chapters went on, both their arms had turned to fire, so they couldn’t use traditional weapons anymore. In making the choice for them to touch the fire, I unknowingly and permanently sent them down the path of becoming a fire being.

    All these different permanence mechanics in Wildermyth created some very noteworthy experiences for me. First off I felt a strong connection to my characters. This comes through what Adam Millard references in his video when he talks about raising pokemon. The characters were mine, and I was able to forge their destinies. On top of that in my second campaign in the game I decided to make one of the characters myself. I gave them my name, and made choices as I would myself whenever anything came up for them. Early on in the campaign my character fell in love with another character and throughout the chapters their kids started joining the adventure. I would purposefully keep my character and his family together so that they would fight together in every battle. It was extra interesting because I almost felt like I had a personal fathership of my character’s children considering they were the children of a character that I totally based on myself. I felt connected to them in a way that I never have in an action-based video game before.

    I also felt a lot of pride and satisfaction while playing this game. Most if it came through bringing one character through an entire campaign of the game. I had a mystic named violet that was one of the first 3 characters that I started with in the campaign. Through all the tough battles, deaths of other characters, and crazy magical stories she came through on the other side. She was 77 years old and was one of the most powerful and wise mystics in all the land. Not only was I proud of myself for keeping her alive, but I was proud of her for evolving and changing into what she had. At the end, she was basically unstoppable and that felt awesome!

    With this connection and pride also came mourning. There came a time in the campaign in which I was to sacrifice one of my characters in order to save the others. I decided to sacrifice myself in order to save the others. Beyond the potential psychological reasons for choosing myself to do such a thing, I was sad. I had grown closer to this version of myself and I really liked him. Because of the game’s permanence, I was sad when I had to sacrifice myself for the greater good.

    Through these dynamics there are two major aesthetics that came through while I was playing. The first is fellowship. Through the characters I built and the procedurally generated choices I made for them, I formed a special bond with my characters. The second is exploration. Of course this comes through all the exploring in the game world that I did while playing, but it mainly came through in the exploration of all the different choices that I could make for my characters. You could say that is more of the narrative aesthetic, but I would counter by saying that I wasn’t exploring those choices for the sake of the narrative. I was doing it because it was interesting to see all the different things that could happen. 

    I quite enjoy Wildermyth. Permanence is definitely a mechanic that makes the game better in a number of different ways. The primary being that it enables players to make special connections with their player characters. For me, these were my favorite parts of the game.