8.5
Wildmender is a beautiful game that manages to balance cosy gardening with epic adventure and ruthless survival. One of my favourite games of the year. And you can hug frogs.
Wildmender
Muse Games · Sep 28, 2023
About
Wildmender is a game about bringing a deserted world back to life.
Explore the vast desert, alone or with friends. Collect plants and bring them back to your garden to thrive. Craft new tools and use them to shape the earth, and channel water to your plants. Delve into the mysteries of a fallen civilization and discover their magic. Befriend animals, spirits, and seek out the gods to help you defend the land from the vicious wraiths who seek to corrupt it. It’s up to you to save the world, one seed at a time.
Turn the Desert Green
With the tools you crafted, set out to grow the little oasis in the middle of a vast desert into your own thriving garden. Plant seeds, dig canals, nurture your plants, craft useful and beautiful structures, harness magical essence, protect against the forces of nature, and more! You’ll have plenty of space and choices to create the garden of your imagination. Acre by acre, you will reclaim the desert and reforest the world.
Uncover the Mystery
What happened to this world? How did everything go wrong? How did the life-draining wraiths corrupt the land? Journey to the temples of the gods, learn their stories, rediscover arcane magic, unlock powerful weapons, tools, and abilities to help you defeat the wraiths, free the gods, and breathe new life to the world.
4-Player Co-op Gardening
Invite up to 3 of your friends to your garden online! Work together to tend your flourishing garden. Share resources and survive together. Adventure with friends through the lonely desert. Fight together against dangerous wraiths. But don’t forget, with more hands to garden you’ll have more mouths to feed!
Customize your Garden and Looks
Just let nature take its course or style the garden to your liking. Craft structures and tools to decorate and shape the terrain. Build bridges over canals, a footpath dotted with lanterns, stucco walls with a gate, magical sigils that return bees to your garden, a streaming waterfall with a pool below, and more. Craft a loom and weave a wide variety of outfits to travel the desert in style.
Trailers & screenshots
Scores by platform
Critic reviews
- 6.0Despite an intriguing premise and unique mechanics, Muse Games' survival crafting experience falters in several ways.
- 8.0Wildmender is a delightful, intuitive survival action-adventure. It may drop into a busy market and genre, but it offers something different, what with a beautiful and interesting story and world to explore. I’m not personally a fan of the combat, but thankfully there’s the opportunity to ignore that side of things if you wish, instead focusing on the adventuring. Include the options to play with friends, working together to make a better place and Wildmender comes across as a big success story.
- 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.
- 5.0Whilst simplistic in its controls and combat, Wildmenders’ harsh environment makes the story, gameplay and environment uninteresting to explore. A sandbox experience that feels too ambitious at once, whereas other games have been more accomplished in what Wildmender was attempting to achieve.
Related games
Rate this game
Drag or use arrow keys to rate
to rate this game.