Mirthwood Review for Steam

Score: 9/10

The newest adventure RPG from Bad Ridge Gaming, Mirthwood, is a not-so-cozy entry into the cozy farming sim genre.

Before I dive into the review, you should know, dear reader, that the opening line is no tea, no shade. This game is not a cozy-wozy lemon dozy put your feet up at the end of a long day and farm virtual carrots kind of game. Mirthwood is what would happen if you unleashed dragons and werewolves into Stardew Valley. It is as if Skyrim had a DLC where players could set up a running farm near Honninngbrew Meadery outside Whiterun and just try to live a normal life while Alduin is trying to end time. It is as if Dark Souls and Clanfolk had a baby.

I’m in love with it.

Mirthwood Story

Mirthwood begins with Galadriel foreshadowing the razing of the Shire. It then turns into a non-tutorial, where the player character briefly interacts with their soon-to-die family before an unknown but also expected enemy arrives and burns their home to the ground. The player character abandons their family to fight the bad guys and makes it to a ship that will take them to the “Freelands.”

I’m only being a little facetious. Technically, your family is alive when you flee, even though your mom can’t run. You just sort of leave them so you can start a new life (insert shrugging emoji).

Well, if they didn’t want to be unalive, then they shouldn’t have been so loving and supportive.

Anyways, the real game begins when Galadriel narrates you over to the Freelands, and a mysterious Stranger gives you a run-down house and land on which to build a new life.

That’s pretty much as far into the main story as I have gotten because Mirthwood contains the most important feature of all RPGs – side quests. Find out answers to the mystery of the mysterious stranger – Drake says no. Help a blacksmith find his hammer? Help a winery drive off some wolves? Help a farming lady get her chickens back? Drake says yes.

The game’s story offers open-ended freedom. I especially like how the game rewards exploration by dropping tantalizing tidbits of lore in the environment (a la Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or anything else by Hidetaka Miyazaki). Players should absolutely take the time to look at the visual cues and read all the letters and notes because these items have been carefully placed to deepen the sense of lore of the game.

Gameplay

There is a lot to love here, but excuse me while I rant for the next 171 words.

The combat system blows! Even thinking about it makes me want to go Charlie Brown kicking a football – Arrrgggrrrhhhhh! It is clunky, slow to respond, difficult to aim an attack, and you never know what dang direction your dodge roll is going to take you in. I have died numerous times because I got caught in executing an unwanted attack combo that was a good six feet to the left of the bandit/wolf/spriggan I was trying to hit. Don’t get me started on blocking. Useless. There is potential here to be more like Dark Souls strategic battles than Skyrim’s hack’n’slash battles. Players can take the time to learn each enemy’s moves and time their counterattacks, but all of that brain work doesn’t mean shush when you dodge roll backward into a tree.

Now granted, granted! There is an option to make combat easier and to take less hit damage from enemies, which is appreciated, thank you devs. But that means little when the actual combat mechanics are so infuriating.

Okay. I’m done. Now, onto the good stuff, which is pretty much everything else.

Exploration is fantastic. There are no obvious quest markers on the active play screen to lead players in the direction they might want to go. Players can access their maps to look for a yellow blob that indicates the general area they should be heading, but nothing says “This Way to Danger.” This means players have to actually learn the environment and see the visual cues that would tell them where they are in the world. I haven’t relied on the road system so much since Morrowind. For me, this deepened my experience in the game because I felt like I actually began to know the world rather than just playing around in it.

Supposebly, players can fast-travel using the road signs, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

This leads me to my next point, which I surprisingly love. There is like…zero tutorial. I don’t know if I blacked out and missed it, but besides telling me which buttons attacked and blocked or how to bring up my menu, Mirthwood gave me next to nothing on how to play. This has significantly slowed my progress in leveling. Still, like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, I have a sense of realism, like I wouldn’t actually know how to do things because I haven’t done them before.

In addition to the RPG aspects, Mirthwood’s life-sim features are somewhere between satisfying and infuriating. Okay, the only element I’m actually infuriated with is how difficult it is to plant neat rows of cabbage, but other than that, it is great. Players can fully embrace their farmer persona, paying attention to which crops to grow in which season and watching market values to figure out when is the best time to sell carrots versus peas. The farming and crafting mechanics are intuitive to anyone who plays life sims- once players find the quest to get farming tools that is (be sure to talk to everyone when you first start otherwise you will just run around confused for an hour or two).

Players can renovate and customize their house and craft all the necessary items to help them survive in their new home.

Overall

Mirthwood is fantastic, and I think it would appeal to a wide range of gamers, whether they like life-sims or RPGS. Be prepared to rage quit when a rat kills you because of the clunky combat, but you won’t be able to stay away for long.

Mirthwood is available now for PC via Steam. 

Related: Reviews by Michelle Jones

Michelle Jones

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I'm a completionist gamer who just needs to find that one last object and clear that final dungeon. I love all video games, from open world sandboxes on a console to a mindless match three on my phone. In addition to gaming and writing, I am a graduate student working on a thesis about the ancient Icelandic Sagas. Feel free to ask me anything about Vikings.

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