Wildmender

Game Title: Wildmender
Released: September 28, 2023
Grade: C

 Mechanics

Expectations: This game was oddly paired with Paleo Pines inside a Cozy Exploration bundle on Steam. I found this rather curious as it is advertised as a survival game. The idea of restoring the desert to a lush garden did appeal to me. Unfortunately, the design of the game was nowhere near what I thought it was going to be. Think of it more like a conceptual playground that randomly disperses elements into a world to explore. There is no cohesion or story outside the main quests that unlock plot devices for progression. The interactable ghosts and shrines will only leave you with a brief narrative or poem before sending you on your way. The scrolls you find aren't legible and are only used as a means to provide you unlockable points. 

Survival: If story isn't really the focal point, then the most important part of the game has to be making sure you don't die. There are three things to mainly have to worry about: thirst, hunger, and life. This would be easier if you didn't also have to consider the adverse effects of your environment as well. You might find a festival cake inside a chest that fills your stomach but its dryness will make you more thirsty. You might find some dirty water in an old well to drink from but it will leave you slightly poisoned. Eating a particular type of plant could restore some health but its dry texture will make you want more water. I had thought resting in a tent would top off all your stats but it only restores your health. In fact, the opposite occurs as your appetite will continue to drain as time accelerates. 

Time of Day: What made me quite puzzled is that there was never really a good reason to be out during the day. The sun will drain your health. Ghosts cannot be interacted with until nightfall. Even if you unlock a shrine, you must wait until dusk to talk to the one buried. You aren't able to collect essence from plants. It is as if the entire day portion was specifically designed for you to stick close and expand the primary locations where water pours out from underneath the ground. Building defenses up for random wraith attacks is certainly a good idea during this time.

Other: As you progress through the game, you'll fumble around trying to learn how to craft objects and what the various spirits will supply you with. There are mushrooms that grows into an umbrella that partially shades you from the sun and lets you glide down like Mary Poppins. There is a form of combat system where you shoot a laser or deflect beams of light. You can exchange material at an altar for keys that open special chests. You'll receive a special artifact that allows you to run or climb faster. The functionality of many of these things are obscure to a new user without some experimentation.

Construction

Water: The game does its best to push you through a small tutorial explaining how your tools work but it throws you in the deep end when it comes to figuring everything else out... which is ironic considering how little water there is in the desert. When you first wake up, there is this tiny stone statue that shoots out water. After you unlock some trait points from conversing to ghosts or reading scrolls, you can learn how to unlock more out in the world. The amount of water that comes out depends on what setting you choose and the type of traits you unlock. The ones in the world will gush in all directions but the ones that become available to you will accumulate in a small pool. In order for the water to expand away from its source, you must use your spade and dig a trench. This allows plants to sprout without the need of you manually watering them. Their growth rate is dependent on how lush the land is around them. As you can tell, this process of learning what each plant requires can become exhausting as your need for food grows at about the same rate they do. 

Plants: Of course, nothing is possible unless you gather seeds first. There is nothing challenging about finding clusters of dead plants or trees in the world, looking for sparkles in the ground, and digging up remnants of their offspring from the ground. There is a limit to how crowded an area can be but usually the plants can be planted very close together. Information from the soil will be shown before planting and the status of your little buds will be shown when you select them. Don't worry too much about their location in the garden since it's possible to move them elsewhere, even trees at one point. 

Essence: In addition to needing different kinds of seeds and materials, the biggest hindrance of the game is how everything requires essence. Activating almost anything in the environment will require a large sum of essence. This gets incredibly frustrating when you reach a certain location and, in an attempt to interact with a few things, realize that you do not have the right amount of materials with you. Acorns, for example, will only drop off Oak Trees in a much rarer dense area. You will slowly accumulate essence on your own but not enough to justify waiting around before you can teleport back. I had to learn from a loading tool-tip that it was possible to use a broken teleporter if you are physically there. Using a built shrine as a ghost locator requires essence. A part of me wishes there was a better system in accumulating essence outside hanging around grown plants at night. 

Summary

Review: The amount of effort and planning required to make any form of progress outweighed my attention. Even when the game offers you a number of sliders to adjust the difficulty, there wasn't enough substance to keep me going. Since the world is randomly generated, there is only a handful of buildings that will populate around primary sites and variations in the environment to keep things interesting. Combat is reduced to firing a single shot or reflecting a laser. I might not have been able to complete the game but the potential of enjoying what's there might appeal to certain individuals.