Why are there wraiths in my gardening game?
The point of Wildmender is that you are given a big ol' desert, and some plants and gardening tools. The plot is superfluous.
So why do the wraiths keep attacking me?
I beat the game! I murdered their leader! Why are they still staging attacks at regular intervals!
Okay, that said, the difficulty settings are super easily configurable in many different ways, so you can turn wraith damage off, etc, to make the game fit your needs and desires. I haven't actually messed with this because I'm cool with smiting a wraith every so often. Also, on standard difficulty you can just surround your home base with tower defense sigils and they will literally take care of everything up to and including the final boss for you. With the teleportation system, all you have to do is go home when a wraith attack occurs, and then lead the attackers to their doom. So the wraiths don't have to be a problem.
I really like climbing around a 3D world building my garden. I think there's a lot of end game potential - I really want to see if, if I upgrade all the springs fully, I can fill the channels of the salt flats with water, for example. (In which case I will need some sort of swim mechanic to get more pearls to upgrade the rest of the springs in the game.)
I liked how you can just garden your way past the game's obstacles. You're supposed to have a special bracelet for the salt flats to keep them from draining your water, but if you just fill your inventory with acorns and revive every spring you come across, the water drainage is manageable without that.
I think there should be more plants. There are a lot at the beginning of the game, and then toward the end it starts to feel kind of repetitive, you've got some half dozen base plants that come in different skins and all the loot is the same. You could get some really cool DLC in there by adding end-game quests to revive old strains of plants, explore seed bunkers, etc.
It's also a very lonely game. You are literally the only living creature in the world when you start. Oh, there are the gods, and your tutorial leader, but once they run out of tutorials it's just... you and the plants. Which is great! It's exactly what I'm looking for! but the loneliness creeps on you. Maybe I'm not hugging my frogs enough.
(Pro tip: Collect pearls from the salt flats and feed them to your frogs not for the upgrade capability but so that they glow purple and you can find them more easily.)
I had a lot of fun, but it would be more fun in co-op. I really want to play with Tea, but Tea cannot handle combat at all - I was hoping for a combat-free game, and then I was working on my save to beat the final boss so that the wraiths would go away so I could get Tea to come garden with me. So that's really why I'm upset about the continued wraiths. (Mind, Tea doesn't have a Windows operating system to work with, so the day is far anyway.)
It's about impossible to play the game without a mouse. You can't strafe without one, and even climbing the spiral staircases was extremely difficult. (The difficulty level dropped dramatically when I plugged in a mouse. Wraiths were a minor concern compared to getting the timing right to WASD myself around a spiral staircase with no rails.)
The game does not prevent you from going off the edge of the map, it just puts a really big cliff there. So if you want to push your boundaries, empty your inventory of important material first. I do not recommend jumping off the cliff with all the easily-obtained instances of the most difficult resource in the game. Usually you can reclaim your body, but not if it's rolled off the bottom of the cliff into doesn't-exist land.
The game tells you that you can cycle through tools using the keyboard shortcut T. It does not tell you that if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can also use that scroll wheel. For a long time I thought it was the worst glitch in the game (there are others) and also that the game was poorly designed in terms of giving you about a dozen tools that you have to keep jabbing T to get round the circuit of. I still think a hotkey system with numbered tools would work better.
It took me a really long time to find out the cape of winds was useful. I got it to tick off the quest box, and then kept on climbing and using the vine bridge mechanism. Once I figured out the cape holy crap were the salt flats less miserable. up down up down up down infinite umbrella mushrooms...
