Review: Wycheweald

Review: Wycheweald

REVIEW BY MPK

Most outlets will be declaring this year's best game on all formats to be Baldur's Gate 3, a fantasy RPG with a party of four on a quest, fighting through turn-based tactical fantasy battles to win the day. Meanwhile, we have Wycheweald, which feels like that game's 8-bit ancestor. Same thing, but 8-bittier.

Wycheweald starts out in the middle of a catastrophe - outsiders have sacked your village, and your neighbours are scattered. Who the invaders are, and why they've shown up, is revealed over the course of the game as you start solving quests, adding members to your party and slowly increasing your tactical options.

With your explorations presented in a first-person window, the core combat has you positioning your team in a 2x2 grid, while your enemies do the same, limiting who can hit who, who can defend their team and so on.

Managing your attack and defence each turn, and rationing the scarce action-points used for special moves & spells is where the gameplay is. It starts out easy, perhaps a little too easy, but ramps up the difficulty as the story progresses. Weapons and armour are a big part of dealing with this ramp-up, as is traditional, and naturally your characters will level up and get additional options.

Nothing ground-breaking then, but with clear graphics, atmospheric music, enough story to keep you interested and enough tactical options to keep you challenged, it all hangs together beautifully.

Even back in the day, the Spectrum had few games of this genre and now that BG3 has made RPGs cool again, it's fitting that our little rainbow menace has its own top-notch example for 2023.