I’m always a little suspicious of self-described “wholesome” games. Too often, they use the label to unironically hide games that are just full of repetitive tasks, buried beneath a cutesy veneer.
So I went into Wyrmhall: Brush and Banter – a cozy, “wholesome” game about cleaning – half-expecting the worst. Sure, it promised jokes, but much like the shallow gameplay, the genre isn’t really known for being hilarious.
You can imagine my surprise to discover that, yes, Wyrmhall is funny, and yes, Wyrmhall is good. It’s nice to be proven wrong sometime.
To be sure, it’s not the deepest game. You play as a temp worker/goblin forced to take over a kiosk for a week. Your job: to clean magical artefacts. And that’s all you do, for a couple of hours, over and over again. You occasionally get new skills, but for the most part, what you’re doing on Day 1 of your job is what you’re doing on Day 7.
Thankfully, things are broken up by surprisingly funny conversations. Whether it’s the owner of a magical duck who needs to get their fowl cleaned for the big parade, a dark lord who likes having his skull polished, your bratty younger sibling who can’t stop eating junk, or any number of other oddball characters that inhabit Wyrmhall’s medieval fantasy village, the game does a great job of helping the time pass by quickly by giving you interesting people to talk to.
Mind you, that’s also kind of the drawback of the game – it passes a little too quickly. Wyrmhall was designed to be beaten in a single sitting of 2-3 hours, and it doesn’t have a tonne of replay value (multiple endings notwithstanding, you’re basically doing the same thing every playthrough until you have to make a choice at the end). While the game isn’t super expensive, it’s hard to rave about too much when it’s ultimately so short.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time! Wyrmhall is a rare bird: a cozy game that doesn’t try to hide how repetitive it is at its core, but finds a way to make that gameplay loop surprisingly addictive. If you’re looking for something to knock out in a sitting, it’s worth checking out.
Leafy Games provided us with a Wyrmhall: Brush and Banter PC code for review purposes.
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