We’d all like to play more games with our friends. That simple joy becomes harder the older you become, whether that’s through new, more serious relationships, starting families, or increasing responsibility in your job. Shared RPG experience then becomes even harder to sustain, and for lives where D&D nights have been replaced by early nights, the team at Wayfinder Studios are bringing you Wyldheart, a co-op RPG with bitesized campaigns that you can get through in a couple of hours. If you’re of a certain age, it might be the answer to your role-playing prayers.
We got to go hands-on with Wyldheart in the lovely company of two members of the Wayfinder Studios team: ex-DICE AAA dev and Creative Director, and studio co-founder, Dennis Brännvall, and Marketing Director, Erin Bower. They were the perfect pair to experience the game for the first time, not least because they kept me heading in the right direction, and consistently forgave me when I didn’t sneak past a nearby skeleton and got us into yet another fight.
First, though, you create a character. There’s the option of human Freefolk, the diminutive Mosslings or the imposing Grimhorn, with an initial selection of body types for each to start with. Where it gets interesting is in selecting a background, which dictates your initial loadout, and gives you something of a backstory as well, so you might be a former squire, previously serving a noble purpose, until it all came to an end, or a lapsed friar, trusted with words and rites that cost you dearly. There’s a good range here to pick from too, as well as a dice-rolling random name generator, which is how I set forth as a Mossling Squire named Irving Thistledew.
You begin a campaign, arriving instantly into your first quest. Our hands-on brought us to the Trial of the Slime Lord, arriving in a dank series of underground caves, filled with pools of luminous green slime, and the only mildly worrying skeletal remains of the caves’ previous visitors.
There’s the instant feel of a D&D campaign here, and your journal gives you the context you need to make your way forward through the dungeon. You can practically hear it being read out by a Dungeon Master, and it sets the perfect tone for some adventuring. Dennis tells us, “It’s definitely inspired by probably more old-school D&D or RPGs from the 80s and the 90s. Rustic, more lethal, less instantly becoming really powerful and fighting gods and mighty wizards and more about taking your time. That’s our game.”
You’re going to have to work for it. That means fighting off skeletons and necromancers, with some hard hitting melee, ranged and magical combat, searching for loot and some light puzzling too. There’s a few nice touches here too, from using a character’s perception ability to find a hidden section of dungeon, to the audio mechanics that will see enemies come running if you’re smashing everything in sight.
It is, of course, made all the better by playing with others. Just talking to each other as we started to explore, sticking our hands into slime to see what’s in there, we started to build a rapport that was built around the atmospheric setting that the team have created. Dennis tells us, “You can play it solo if you prefer. We are working on allowing some AI companions to that you can fight alongside you. But it scales pretty nicely up to four players. So it’s really up to how you want to play. If you are a solo player, you can still play it and enjoy it. My personal favorite is probably playing duos, so just with another player, and there’s quite a few of us who prefer to get a full party going and get the excitement and chaos that usually follows that many players.”
There’s plenty of excitement and chaos as we make our way through the dungeon. I’m playing a halfling, but I opted for a massive, two-handed sword, gifted to me by Dennis since you can share loot, and it looks and feels awesome. Erin agrees, noting “The great sword looks so cool on the small halfling!” We are perhaps ten minutes into our adventure, and we are already having fun, with Wyldheart providing the ideal base for some high fantasy shenanigans.
The dungeon has that classic, gothic feel, and while it might feel familiar, it’s almost a visual shorthand that puts you straight into the action. When you’re short of time, that’s what you need, and that idea of bringing people together, letting them adventure for a little bit, and being able to round out that quest in a relatively short period of time just fits so well into lives that have too many demands on our time.
Wyldheart’s game world takes place across a large hex-based overworld, with each of its 250-plus hexes playing home to something, whether it’s part of the critical central campaign, or an interesting side quest or location. Unusually, Wyldheart is going for focus over expansiveness, with the main storyline quests only making up around ten hours of content each.
Explaining that decision, Erin tells us, “If you want to play a co-op RPG experience with friends, your options are usually a 300 hour story campaign which can be really, really difficult to complete with the same group of players, or jumping into an MMO, which is totally daunting for a completely different reason. So, this game having only 10 hours of main story quest [in each campaign] means that, if you’re at a LAN festival or you’ve just got a long weekend or a couple of nights of gaming with a core group of friends, you can probably actually see the whole story together.”
She continues, “However, if you enjoy spending time in the world, then there’s all the sandbox content.” That includes a wealth of side quests, exploration, and crafting, while the team also have plans for players to buy and furnish your own lodgings as well, letting you put down some permanent roots in Wyldheart’s world.
It’s such a timely idea, as the weight of our backlogs alone makes it incredibly hard to find time to forge gaming connections with a group of friends. It feels as though the team at Wayfinder Studios have really hit upon a great idea, and the delivery of that idea is already fresh and fun, even at this early stage.
If you’re time poor, but friend rich, Wyldheart looks set to give you an achievable and approachable platform for adventuring, with a great range of Dungeons & Dragons-inspired distractions to bring you all together. I’m already planning Irving’s next quest.
Wyldheart is coming soon to PC, and you can wishlist the game now on Steam or Epic Games Store and support the Kickstarter here.
