The world lived long ago but that time is over. All that’s left is sand, wind and the wraiths who destroyed everything, watched over by the ghosts of the world’s former inhabitants and the crumbled ruins of shrines to their gods. The last spark of life is on the verge of flickering out, just the remains of what had been a giant tree with a trickle of pure water from a clogged spring at its base. The wraiths flit about the ruined landscape, maybe happy at its destruction or not, it’s hard to tell. Whatever reasons they had to eradicate all life aren’t so important as that they’ve just about succeeded, and wrapping up the victory is just a matter of time unless someone shows up who can somehow nurture the remains of the world back to life.
Wildmender is a survival adventure game set in a land that’s seen much better days, where a young adventurer (male, female, any point in between or neither, it’s your call) not only needs to fight back the evil that’s all but won, but also make the world habitable again. Fighting evil is something that happens while out and about, spicing up exploration and occasionally providing an actual challenge, but turning the desert back into a livable plant-covered environment is going to take a fair amount of terraforming. The map is large and the damage done to it can feel overwhelming, but starting with home base and slowly expanding outward is a nicely methodical process that lets you organically create a huge, frequently-chaotic garden of your own.
As the noted philosopher Sam Kinison once screamed, you live in a desert. Nothing grows out here; nothings gonna grow out here. Or at least it won’t without a little help and a touch of magic. The desiccated remains of dunegrass may be dead but they’ve got seeds buried nearby beneath a helpfully-glowing point on the ground, and new dunegrass plants are just what’s needed to turn sand into soil. Craft a wooden sickle to break down some dead shrubs, then a wooden shovel to dig up the seeds, and that’s the first steps towards injecting a little green into the sandy-tan landscape. Plants need water, of course, and the only thing you arrived in the world carrying aside from the clothes on your back is a small waterskin, which will do the job nicely until the spring is back on its feet. With the sand slowly changing to dirt, that gives a place for the sunburst shrubs to go, and soon the tree and its spring are surrounded by a growing oasis.
While this is a good start, the map is large and progress slow so it’s time to start getting upgrades. The only companion is a helpful but amnesiac floating rune who’s been guiding the adventurer through the opening steps, but new skills will come from the memories of the ghosts of the land. The first one shows up at the oasis but the rest are out in the world, and their memories let you buy new abilities that can have a huge effect on the game. One of the things Wildemender gets correct is how most upgrades feel like real advances in power, whether that be something as basic as the opening skills of being able to craft shelter and storage to changes in mobility that make getting around the world fast and efficient. Once the game gets going there are a lot of moving pieces and while the skill tree isn’t all that big, the bulk of its nodes are something you’ll want to have.
After the first major quest, which involves chasing down pieces of the floating rune companion across the earliest sections of the open-world map in order to restore its memory, the next quest kicks the terraforming into high gear. The sunburst shrubs gain an evolution that converts the surrounding landscape to meadow, and new seeds for oak trees, berries, flowers and other plants are waiting to be dug up. The adventurer has a little magic as well, and this is used for everything from singing a growth tune to the plants to being part of the necessary materials to unclog the spring for more water. Attack the edges of the spring with the shovel and you can dig channels for it to flow, expanding its presence into the world much farther than its start as a glorified puddle. Construct a few bridges and paths to keep things organized or go for a wilder look; so long as there’s plenty growing, it will all work out.
Each plant has its own growth cycle, at which point they let out seeds, fruit, flowers, nuts, and other products. A big part of Wildmender is tending to the garden, keeping the plants watered and singing them to quicker flowering with a greater yield, and eventually it gets large enough you’ll want to be picky about what you harvest. Seeds and cactus fruit are great for food at the beginning but different plants have different effects, whether that be restoring a few points of magic or an increase or decrease in the thirst meter. The water skin only holds so much and can be refilled at a spring as often as you like, but it’s easy to run out when exploring. Additionally, the teleporter pads that are vital for fast travel all require a bit of magic to use, but there are a million things to do away from home base like fixing blocked or corrupted springs, speaking to ghosts or making offerings at graves. Keeping a good supply of versatile ingredients is always a smart move, but inventory is limited and most foods don’t keep forever.
As important as it is to expand the garden, and as easy as it is to blow off several in-game days in a row arranging things just right, you’ll need to take on the wraiths and their defenses out in the world to earn the upgrades to make home base even fancier. The basic goal of the quests is to find the shrines to the land’s gods somewhere out in the world, with each area having its own defenses and status effects. The salt flats, for example, quickly wear down the thirst meter, and there are a good number of red crystal outcroppings on corrupted ground dotting the landscape, ready to zap a careless traveler unless they zap back quick. The main combat item is a mirror that can either shoot out a bolt of light or throw up a reflective shield, both of which are necessary when the wraiths come to defend their territory. Combat isn’t too hard once you get the flow, but it can still be hectic when surrounded by enemies and electric-zapping crystals. Fortunately the penalty for death is to drop everything but your tools and revive back at base, so a few seconds of prep work and a quick hop to the nearest teleporter lets you retrieve the lost loot and try again.
There’s much more to Wildmender as well, with a lot to discover and plenty of secrets, but it’s also more ambitious than the tech at its disposal. Teleporting back to base, for example, usually involves the landscape and permanent landmarks loading in first while the rest of the garden pops in over the next several seconds, and while the quick teleport is nice, I’d rather have waited on the loading for the garden to be ready. Inventory management can also be weird, with items put into storage sometimes not stacking right and requiring pulling in and putting back a few times before the game admits that, yes, these are the same things and can go together. One of the mini-quests of inviting a sprite back to camp isn’t working on my game and I’m fairly sure it’s caught in a rock where it should be patrolling, and while getting the camera to clip through the landscape is easy when climbing a wall, I can’t quite get it to peek inside the landscape in my missing-sprite area. At the time of this writing there’s a lot of post-release bug fixing I’d hope to see, but despite this Wildmender is still a favorite.
Closing Comments:
The ambition of the game design makes it easy to overlook Wildmender’s technical flaws. There’s just so much to mess around with, whether that be exploring the land looking for shrines, ghosts and graves, turning up new seeds and seeing what they grow, figuring out how to make rare hybrid crops, or just hanging out at home base to spruce the place up after un-collected seeds sprout new plants that clutter up the landscape. There’s even a feature where you can hug your giant frogs, which is pointlessly adorable. Carving stream beds after placing new springs, discovering what a useless trinket can actually do, beating up on wraiths, purifying the land and much more are all available to do at any given moment, and aside from the occasional sandstorm or enemy attack, there’s no railroading in how you can approach it. This easily leads to multi-hour semi-obsessive playing, especially when opening up new items like a windmill that can pump water through pipes to provide automated irrigation or a wind cloak that completely changes how you explore the world. The landscape of Wildmender is broken and dead, and the wraiths might have succeeded in destroying it if reviving the world wasn’t so compulsively playable.
