Stacklands is cool! But short. But also only $5! So I recommend it.
Click this image and get the game!
I like Stacklands. Like many things that I enjoy, I wish there was more of it. But for what it cost, and what I got, I’m satisfied, and I feel confident recommending it. I have a few minor gripes, but in my time playing, I didn’t encounter any major bugs or flaws. So yeah, I recommend it.
Stacklands is also the first time I’ve played something by Sokpop Collective that I’ve really liked. Before Stacklands I’d kind of written them off as an indie arthouse studio, partly because I’m an asshole, and partly because they didn’t seem to make games with gameplay.
I’ve used the word “Engine Builder” more than I usually would in recent writing, at least for writing about video games, but I think it’s pretty accurate for Stacklands. I guess you could call it a progressive management game instead, but that just sounds like your boss decided switch the team to a 4 day work week.
A clean, untouched board. Don’t worry, that won’t last long.
In any case, here’s how Stacklands works: to start, you’re given a single booster pack of cards. After opening it, you’ll get a few different cards, and a villager. The other cards are also important, but if all your villagers die, you lose.
At least to start, most cards require you to place a villager on them to generate a resource. That’s kind of a cop out, but let me give a few examples. The Berry Bush card does nothing on its own, but when a villager is placed on it, the villager will harvest 3 berries from that card before it disappears. The same is true for cards like the iron ore vein, or trees, though they give different resources. However, some cards like the lumberyard and quarry, can’t be exhausted. They can be harvested any number of times (though usually slower then the impermanent cards).
Villager working on a Berry Bush. Gif shamelessly stolen from the Stacklands itch.io Page.
So, how do you get cards ? There are two primary methods. The first is to buy card packs. You buy them with coins, and almost every card has a coin value. You can unlock several types of card back, and even if you die, pack types that you unlock stay purchasable. Each pack gives different subsets of cards, and while some are available in multiple packs, most pack types have at least one or two unique cards. They also have ‘ideas’.
Ideas are the game’s recipes. You only have to unlock them once in order to be able to use them in future runs. In order to use them, you place the required items on top of each other. A countdown starts, and when it finishes, you get the item from the recipe. One minor annoyance I have is that while you can use a recipe without discovering it, the game doesn’t reveal those recipes if you find them by luck or clever experimentation. You still have to get the idea card.
I like farms and carrots. Can you tell?
Villagers can die in a couple different ways. It’s possible that you don’t have enough food to feed them all at the end of a round, and so they starve to death. It’s also possible that an enemy just murders them. Enemies can spawn from exploring certain locations, or buying certain card packs. They can also be spawned by a mysterious portal, which show up on specific numbered rounds. There is one more way to spawn an enemy, but that one’s a bit secret, so I’m not gonna spoil it here.
There are also some other mechanics that I haven’t really covered here, including exploring, villager promotions, and storage limits, but I also don’t have anything useful to say about them in the context of this review.
I do have two gripes with Stacklands, one of which is legitimate, and the other I think might be a design choice, but it’s a design choice that I find really annoying! The second strikes me as something that might have been intended to function like that.
First, the legitimate gripe! When you mouse over a card pack to buy it, you’re given a slowly scrolling list of text in the bottom left corner that lists what you can get in the card pack, and I hate this. I hate having to wait for the scrolling to see what I could get, and I really wish I could either click on the card pack to see a list, or have the text box expand or something. I really wish I could see everything at once.
Second, the “I just don’t like this design choice” gripe. There are a variety of cards that produce cards either when you put a villager to work on them, or when you place various resources on them. It’s never really clear to me where the produced cards will end up. Let’s use the farm as an example. You can plant a crop on top of the farm card. When the farm card finishes ticking down, a new card is created. But when a farm produces, the new card(s) appear someplace next to the farm. Since I was growing carrots by the truckload, I then had to 1. Replant the carrots and 2. Keep moving carrots around to keep everything organized.
Like. A LOT of Farms.
Stacklands as a game isn’t long enough for this to become super tedious, and I feel like this is a specific design choice to make growing certain crop types more mentally taxing, but I did find it annoying.
Stacklands is $5 on itch.io, and $5 on Steam. Gametrodon editorial policy, dictates that “The people that make games should be the people that make money.” So buy it off itch.io rather than Steam. Look, you’re probs gonna buy off Steam anyway, so I’m going to make you google it.
Weird West claims to be an immersive-sim, but the only thing immersive about the game is the story and worldbuilding. Everything else is janky and awful.
When I first started writing this article, I’d played 8 or so hours of Weird West. At this point, having written most of it, and just editing the writeup, I’ve played about 18. Normally I don’t write about games until I finish them, but in its current state and price point, I just can’t recommend Weird West. I would really like to though, because the story and world building is top notch. Now, it’s possible I’ll play a lot more Weird West, and change my mind. Based on various story mechanics, I would estimate I’ve played through 50-60% of the game’s main path story.
And it is a good story! I’m putting this entire paragraph here, because I cannot praise the writing and world building of this game enough to do it justice in this writeup. The Weird West setting feels on par with something like the Fallen London setting, from well… Fallen London, but also Sunless Sea.
Unfortunately, Weird West’s writing is shackled to some truly awful gameplay, gameplay which I am going to tear into in a moment.
Weird West describes itself as an immersive sim, a genre I’m not super familiar with, but includes games such as Prey and System Shock. I decided to go read the Wikipedia page for the genre, and it describes it as a genre “that emphasizes player choice. Its core, defining trait is the use of simulated systems that respond to a variety of player actions which, combined with a comparatively broad array of player abilities, allow the game to support varied and creative solutions to problems, as well as emergent gameplay beyond what has been explicitly designed by the developer.“
I disagree heavily with Weird West calling itself an immersive sim. It does not meet this definition, because ‘Emergent Gameplay’ doesn’t feel present whatso-fucking-ever.
Almost all interactions with NPC’s are pre-scripted, and there’s no ability to for example, recruit anyone into your party. Even when you’re given optional side quests or routes, they show up in the quest tracker the same as everything else. They’re specifically present because the designer put them there.
Today, I woke up and chose violence. Because I can’t choose anything else.
Now it’s possible by emergent gameplay they mean “You can kill everyone and still go through the game!” This isn’t good enough in my book. It’s 2022. Killing a quest-vital NPC, and then finding their diary that contains the information you needed from them isn’t impressive. At best, I’d call it “robust.” You’ve made a game that handle the player being a psychopathic murderer well. I don’t know why I’d want to do that. Even if I wanted to, this brings me to the next point: the combat in Weird West is fucking awful.
Combat in Weird West is real time, and it’s primarily influenced by your abilities and your weapons. There are five weapon types, which from what I can tell are pistol, rifle, melee, shotgun, and one I haven’t encountered yet. There are also a variety of explosives. Your abilities require mana to use. The game doesn’t call it mana and it’s purple, but it’s mana.
Okay, so that’s enough about how combat works from a high level. Let’s talk about why it’s awful. While combat wants to be real time, the actual way the game controls is incredibly clunky on both mouse and keyboard, and controller. On mouse and keyboard, you use WASD to move, so you can only move in 8 directions, and you use your mouse to change camera direction. Except when you actually pull out your weapon to shoot, you can’t rotate the camera anymore, because now you can only control the direction your character is facing. So if you end up in a enclosed or complex space, the controls completely fall apart, and reorienting the camera to see the bear coming to maul you requires you to put your gun down, which you usually don’t want to do, since you’re trying to reload.
And it also just feels like shit. In addition, ability slots aren’t customizable, they’re hard bound to the weapon, so in order to use a base skill, you need to not have any weapons drawn, and holstering a weapon changes the menu the second you start the holster. I think I accidentally used the “slow down time” power at least a dozen times while trying to use the ability on my rifle, because I wanted to readjust the camera angle for a shot, which meant I HAD to holster my rifle.
In addition to this, Weird West has verticality. The game has a auto-aim feature for determining what you are aiming at, and locking on appropriately, except it doesn’t actually work well. There were several situations where it simply refused to let me aim at a sentry overlooking a clearing, and forced me to aim at a horse standing between us, simply because the line drawn between me and the target intersected the horse. To be clear: The horse was not between us on the horizontal plane. It was below us.
Artist Rendition
I ended up having to kill two horses before I was able to shoot sentry. Of course, it didn’t really matter that much, because the AI in Weird West is both janky and dumb as hell. Every enemy has apparently attended the “video game enemy school of guarding” which teaches that the only true way to stand guard is to wait around, and just because Tim walked away, and then you walked over and found him shot in the head, doesn’t mean there’s any reason to stay worried for more than 30 seconds. Now, to be fair, it’s not just the enemies that are stupid and buggy. I had a posse member who would cheerfully walk straight ahead, regardless of what was going on, whenever I entered a map instead of following me around. I’ve also seen other villagers just get stuck in doorways, repeatedly opening and closing the door.
Okay. So we’ve talk about why the game doesn’t feel like an emergent sim, since the only “emergent” portions of the game are related to combat, and the combat fucking sucks, because of the controls. Let’s go back to those controls for a moment, because they really suck. I covered combat earlier, but all the menus use that weird “large reticle to mouse over things” setup that Destiny seems to have popularized, and is somehow awful on both MKB and controller. Don’t make me “Hold down a key” to dismantle something, and tap the key to drop it.
Also, while we’re on the subject, here are some more minor gripes I have with the game. The menu to forge ingots/unforge ingots is shit, and unintuitive. The quest tracker only tracks 5 quests at a time, and doesn’t let you choose which five. Almost all random encounters are unavoidable combat, and the combat starts instantly, with no way to avoid them. The inventory is far too small for the amount of shit we’re expected to carry, and equipped items are still IN the inventory, meaning you can accidentally sell/breakdown equipped items, and have them eat an inventory slot. The game is also often buggy, with corpses spazzing out and launching themselves through walls, which is much less amusing when they have a key that’s the only way to open a jail cell with someone you’re trying to keep alive on the other side. Saves don’t go back far enough.
What does each of the options do? Why is it that disassembling ore makes you lose nuggets? Why is the UI set up so you can misclick immediately after clicking an option, and effectively just destroy resources?
So what does Weird West do well? Well, the story and writing are top notch, and are the only reason I’m still playing the game. While I suspect that I’m likely to be let down by the big reveal at the end, the smaller stories and individual side stories do feel meaningful, and I like the mechanics that allow characters you’ve saved (or otherwise helped) to show up to help you out.
The highest praise that I can give the writers is that I’m interested enough in it that I’m still planning to keep playing the damn game despite everything I’ve said above. After all, I already spent my $40, I plan to get what I can out of it.
I think a perfect summary of Weird West can be encapsulated in the following story. There are some very minor spoilers here, so if what you’ve read so far has convinced you that you want to play the game and go in cold, now would be a good time to stop.
The story of the first character you play as revolves around finding your kidnapped husband, ideally before he gets eaten by a flesh eating shapeshifter called a Siren, who hired said kidnappers.
At one point on this journey, the person I needed to shake down for information was a wealthy tobacco merchant/farmer, with a luxurious estate. After having the guards let me onto the estate, I talked with the merchant, and agreed to get him the deed to a farm whose owner wouldn’t sell. Having zero intention of getting and handing over the deed, I instead used my new found access to his property to case the joint, with the intention of doing a robbery later.
While walking around, one of the hired guns patrolling the facility asked me to deliver a letter for him. A love letter in fact, asking this other gunman to quit their jobs here, and run away together. I was more then happy to oblige, mostly out of the hope that if they did do this, there would be two less experienced marksmen present when I would be trying to break in several days later.
However, the second gunman couldn’t read, and so he asked me to meet him at a saloon in a town nearby to discuss it.
You see, it turns out that the nearby patrons are a wee bit homophobic, and by wee bit, I mean that the bar was about to devolve into a gunfight. (In retrospect, I don’t actually know how they knew the illiterate gunslinger was gay, it was never mentioned in any sense.)
I was then presented with 3 options on a menu. 1. Buy the homophobes a round to defuse the situation. 2. Challenge them to a fistfight. 3. Guns blazing.
As I didn’t have money to get everyone piss drunk, I instead opted for a fistfight, hoping that I would be able to just crack a few heads, and make an exit without committing a murder. Immediately after I did this, the game went into the aforementioned combat, and I realized two things. 1. I didn’t know how to actually equip fists. 2. Just because I intended to follow the spirit of fist a cuffs and knock these knuckleheads about didn’t mean that my posse did.
My companions instead pulled an Always Sunny, just started blasting, and several seconds later, the bar had turned into a gun fight.
Reload Save.
This time, instead of proceeding to the local Saloon, I went to the nearby General Store, pawned a bunch of shit, and then entered the Saloon. I was able to buy the assholes off to not start shit, and actually talk to the dude I was supposed to deliver this letter to. Except instead of asking me about the letter, he went into a dialogue tree as if he was still guarding the mansion, asking if I had the deed to be delivered.
Reload Save.
Sell shit. Buy liquor. Talk to gunman. This time, his dialogue options were related to the amorous letter, which I finally delivered, and read to him, as he wasn’t able to read. He was actually happy about the prospect, and decided to wait for his admirer/lover. They got a happy ending, and I had two less guards to worry on my breaking and entering.
I think this snippet does a good job of illustrating the experience of Weird West. It has incredibly strong writing and decently subtle worldbuilding, but its combat is a unfun jank fest, and it’s often buggy. The game claims to be an immersive sim, but once things escalate, there’s often no option other than violence to resolve things. That’s not a ” immersive sim,” that’s just a combat system with physics involved.
I’m going to play more Weird West. I find the story compelling, and I am curious about how it resolves. But that’s in spite of the game’s janky combat and bugs. Honestly, it’s fairly likely that at some point something will break badly enough, and I’ll just quit playing, and read the ending off a wiki somewhere. As such, I don’t currently recommend it.
If you still wanna play it, it’s $40 on all platforms. Console has it on PlayStation 4, and Xbox. For PC, it’s on Steam, Epic, and it looks like it will be on Gamepass in a month or two. For my money, I’d wait for that.
So, for folks who’ve played Yu-Gi-Oh before, and are wondering if they should play Master Duel, here’s my opinion in brief: Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel can be fun, but only to the extent that you play against other people with decks that function at a similar power level. I can’t speak to higher level decks, because I never made one. I spent a non-zero amount of time being thrashed by players who did make high level decks.
A big critical note: Master Duel is ALMOST ENTIRELY PvP. There are some small PvE sections of the game, but they effectively function as tutorials.
As far as being a digital implementation of the physical game, it seems to do a solid job. I have some problems with how it handles certain mechanics, and there’s also very little flare compared to something like Hearthstone, or Legends of Runeterra. When an opponent searches for a card from their deck and adds it to their hand, the game only shows you the card for a brief moment, instead of keeping it revealed. I hate this, as the game has something like 5000+ cards, and I have no idea what a large number of them do.
Finally, its in-game monetization is fucking awful. I don’t give a shit about some “f2p btw top ranked” motherfucker. The only difference between this game and a crackhead with a knife coming at you in an alley is that the second one is being more transparent in their desire to obtain everything in your wallet.
I’m going to be honest. I don’t have much more to say on Yu-Gi-Oh that provides value in the form of a review. Modern Yu-Gi-Oh is an incredibly alien beast to me. Opening turns can go through what feels like half a player’s deck, only to have any advantage gained be destroyed by one or two cards. First turn kills from the second player are common. The game’s balance seems to rely on handtraps, cards that you discard from your hand to negate your opponent’s effects, and quickly recognizing your opponent’s deck archetype. Knowing their combos and how to interrupt them is just a critical skill as knowing how to play your own deck.
I played 40 hours of Master Duel, and this review is the best I can offer. I know that I enjoyed playing against my friends who also installed it. I know I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone as a “single player” game, which it effectively is in many ways. I don’t like it as much as Duel Links, which had a lot of PvE content. I enjoy some forms of competition in card games, but I don’t enjoy grinding ladder, and that’s primarily what Master Duel seemed to offer.
But hey, it was free*. If you still want to play it, you can grab it here.
*Free to get your ass repeatedly handed to you by Eldlich the Golden Lord, seriously, fuck that card, and that deck.
I like Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Does the game have so many technical problems that I’m going to devote at least a paragraph to them below? Yes. But is it also the first Pokémon game that we’ve gotten in 25 years that is actually mechanically different than the other games in the series? Yes. Yes it is.
The rest of this article is going to assume that you’ve played a Pokémon game at some point. If you haven’t, reading this post first will make the rest of this review make more sense.
As mentioned above, Arceus is significantly different than previous Pokémon games. In brief: the game now takes place in a semi-open world. Story progression is based around a combination of catching lots of Pokémon, and mission completion, and there are no gym battles or equivalents. While battling and catching Pokémon both remain, the battle system has been significantly trimmed down, with held items and abilities being removed, and most status effects/stat buffs have also been changed to be simpler. The game does offer the ability to use moves in different styles, but this mostly boils down to “Do more damage, but take longer to act again, or do less damage, but act again quicker.”
You can fight multiple enemy Pokemon at once.
As the game now takes place in an open world, there are no more random battles. Instead, Pokémon just sort of go about the world, doing as they please, with most having a set spawn location. As such, catching Pokémon has changed, with many not even requiring you to battle them. Instead, you just need to get close enough to throw a Pokeball at them and hit them. Pokémon also don’t share the same set of behaviors either. Some will happily watch as you walk closer and closer prior to beaning them in the head with a well placed shot, some will turn tail and run, and some will see you and just start swinging/blasting bubbles/trying to poison you—you get the idea. For Pokémon in this last group, once they notice you and engage in combat, you’ll have to fight them with your own Pokémon if you actually want to catch them. The alternate option is to truffle shuffle your way through the waist high grass and wait for them to look away so you can lob a ball at the back of their head. The game actually encourages this, because back hits have an increased catch rate.
You will never have enough Apricorns, and when you think you do, you’ll be wrong.
Also, because this an open world game, there’s a crafting system. You can craft Pokeballs, revives, and various items with the rocks and berries you find lying around. It’s actually generally not as tedious as it might sound, primarily because the same few mats are used for a bunch of different things, and there also aren’t a ridiculous number of them you have to gather. cougheldenringcough
The open world itself is split up into 6 or so areas, and each area is self contained. For example, you can’t go from the ruin swamp zone to the ice zone without actually going back to town, and then going to the other area on the map. You likely won’t be able to explore every part of a map when you first unlock it, as portions will be locked behind ride Pokémon, the game’s version of HMs. These are various Pokémon that you’ll make friends with and will give you the ability to swim across water, fly across the sky, and scale rock cliffs. Yes, I know it seems like flying would make climbing redundant but it doesn’t really work like that in practice.
Realistically, these open world zones are fine. I’m gonna be honest, you could probably fill a grey box with lots of Pokémon and I would enjoy it. Pokémon Go put Pokémon on top of google maps, and I liked it. With that said, this isn’t Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild, there are no hidden secrets and crevices to find, and each zone itself is pretty small. They’re habitats for the Pokémon that live in them, and not much else unfortunately.
So what do I like? One thing is that Pokémon are actually rendered to scale in this game. This is a small thing, but it really does build the feeling of them being actual animals in the world instead of the “Wailord is the same size as Skitty” that we’ve had from previous games. It also gets used in two of the game’s mechanical systems, where catching Pokemon of different sizes can be a goal for various surveying missions and to distinguish Alpha Pokemon, which I’m just realizing we haven’t covered yet.
I just realized Dusknoir has red eyes by default, making this a terrible example of what this sorta thing looks like…
While you’re journeying around you might find a Pokémon that seems much bigger than you’d think it should be, with glowing red eyes. These are Alpha Pokémon, and they’re great. Outside of the immense bulk, there are few other critical differences. They tend to be much higher leveled then anything in the surrounding area, sometimes have special attacks, and have zero chill. They can’t be captured except by battling them, and until your Pokémon are in the 60-70 level range, they can and will thrash you into the ground.
I really like this because in most Pokémon games, catching Pokémon is pretty much a zero risk process, and you’ll never actually be able to go back to an area and be challenged. Alphas are a nice change of pace, and one of my most memorable moments in the game was wiping my team multiple times into an Alpha Tangrowth, then reviving them while it tried to put me six feet under. Alphas also tend to be Pokémon that could only have been obtained via evolution in previous games, so its just cool to actually fight and catch them in their already evolved forms.
Yes, that’s a wild Empoleon. It fainted from recoil damage. There was some salt.
Now that we’ve covered the actual game and mechanics, let’s talk about the game’s massive technical failings.
First, a brief statement. Creating games is a complex process with multiple disciplines and processes involved. That said , I consider most of the things in the paragraphs below to be effectively statements of fact. Maybe mimicking Super Mario 64’s performance and art style is a design choice, but I don’t give a shit. The game should not look and have performance issues this bad.
Most of the environments in the game look like garbage, and they feel incredibly static and stale outside of the Pokémon inhabiting them. The Pokémon/NPC’s look good, but if you get more than 4 NPC’s on the screen even during a cutscene, the framerate dips. Because of this, there are very few situations where you can have large numbers of different wild Pokémon on screen, and the end result is that the game’s world can feel underpopulated. The game has an amount of pop-in/fade in that’s comical on everything, and when you’re flying around looking for a specific plant, or a Pokémon that might be the size of that plant, this actively screws with your ability to find it. Of everything on this list, this one is biggest hindrance to actively playing the game, and pisses me off the most.
See that little hill in the distance, with nothing on it, and nothing anywhere around it?It’s the one we’re hovering over right here.
In addition to all of this, the game has one of the most screwed up systems for animation level of detail that I’ve seen. It’s most visible on any of the flying Pokemon such as Gyrados, Togetic or Crobat, but you can actively see the point at which they get far enough away from you for the game to start dropping frames from their animation cycle.
Anyway, that’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus. If you’re someone like me who’s always wanted a Pokémon game where you run around massive open environments trying to catch Pokémon, and see them at actual scale, this game is pretty much exactly what you’ve been waiting for. You’ll be able to ignore the game’s flaws and have a lot of fun.
If you’re someone who played the games primarily for the battle system, or for engaging with the secondary mechanics like breeding for perfect IV’s and competitive move sets, those systems have been either stripped out or massively simplified, and I suspect you won’t have as much fun. I don’t personally think that the removal of things like abilities and held items is made up for by the games strong/agile move styles.
And perhaps you’re neither. Perhaps you’re not a Pokémon fan. If that’s the case, I would say that your enjoyment is going to depend heavily on what you want out of the game. You want a game with a mediocre open world, but a bunch of really cool monsters to catch? This could be for you!
If you want a game with an open world that tells a subtle story via its environment and mechanics, with a focus on difficult combat and challenging gameplay? Well, you probably want Elden Ring instead.
You want a large underwater eel? That’s a moray.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is $60 for Nintendo Switch, and only Switch, because the day we get a mainline Pokémon game on a non-Nintendo console is the day we look out the window and see a flock of pigs sailing unimpeded across the clouds.
Nobody Saves The World is great, and you should play it.
Nobody saves the world is pretty great. Between its use of its ability combo and form swapping mechanics, I found it to be an incredibly fun game. The only problem I have with the gameplay is that it mouse/keyboard simply doesn’t play well. A controller is basically required. Otherwise I had a fantastic time with it.
Nobody Saves the World is played from a top down perspective, where you take on the role of the Nobody, a short, blank eyed sort of blob person with no memories of their past. After waking up in a dilapidated shack, and “borrowing” a magic wand from the home of the great wizard Nostramagnus, you set off on a quest to find Nostramagnus, save the world, and figure out how exactly you got here in the first place.
I was gonna post a real zoomed out picture of the world map, but then I realized since this was from my NG+ file, it gave some pretty massive spoilers. So have a smaller one instead.
The magic wand you ‘borrowed’ ends up being the key to all of this, granting you the ability to shift forms. You start out only being able to swap between your pale blobby self and a rat that’s somehow still better in combat than your blobby self. But you’ll start to unlock more forms fairly quickly, such as Knight, Ranger, Magician (the rabbit-from-hat kind) and Egg.
There are 18 total forms available, of which I’d say 17 are meaningful and useful. (Plot twist: the useless one isn’t egg.)
There are two big things about the transformation system in Nobody Saves The World that I like, but explaining them is going to require a little bit more discussion of the other half of the game’s title: the “Saves The World” bit.
See, it turns out that two big problems have popped up at about the same time. The first problem is that the great wizard Nostramagnus who you “borrowed” the magic wand from has disappeared. The second problem is that a giant hivemind flesh blob thing called the Calamity has showed up and is trying to eat the entire world. Presumably Nostramagnus would deal with this if he wasn’t missing.
Anyway, since you have the magic wand, a few other characters decide that you might as well help collect pieces of the gem needed to reseal the Calamity, while they search for Nostramagnus before the world gets treated like a buffet.
Finding these gem pieces, all of which have ended up in large dungeons around the world, sealed by wand stars, is your primary goal. In order to unlock the dungeons, you’ll need to get enough wand stars, and occasionally convince the people guarding these places to let you in. As it turns out, “I am a very legitimate individual, let me through” is actually a pretty terrible way to get into a sacred mausoleum.
The Headquarters of the New League of Wizards. (The New LOW)
I think that’s enough background to give a good picture of the game’s primary gameplay loop. Explore to find locked dungeons, towns, and other stuff. Do side quests and mini-quests to get more wand stars, and unlock the game’s main dungeons. Clear the main dungeons to get MacGuffins to advance the story, giving you more areas to explore. I don’t think explanation quite does justice to how much fun doing all of the above is.
But anyway, remember when I mentioned several paragraphs ago that I like the game’s transformation system for two reasons? Let’s get back to that for a moment. A lot of games with transformation systems seem to use them as glorified keys. Turn into a penguin for the ice zone. Turn into a ninja for the stealth zone. Turn into a cop for the donut zone. But outside of the respective zones, each of those forms is often fairly useless.
NSTW doesn’t do that. While there are a few situations for where you need a form to travel, even those tend to be fairly open (i.e., if you need to get over a large body of water, the turtle, ghost, dragon or mermaid are all equally viable.) But the meat of the transformation system is all about combat, and it feels fantastic.
Form swapping can be done from both the menu screen, and by using the scroll wheel on the fly.
NSTW resembles an action RPG. Each form in Nobody Saves the World has a basic attack, and a passive ability, in addition to its base stats. These two abilities are locked onto that form, and they are fairly varied. As an example, the horse’s basic attack is a kick that hits behind the it, while the slug’s basic attack is a series of small projectiles that are fired after a brief charge time. The strongman has large slow attack that hits most of the area in front of him, while the ranger fires arrows. All these basic attacks regenerate mana when they hit an enemy.
But the forms aren’t limited to these attacks. As you rank up a form by completing its quests, you’ll unlock additional attacks, and when you hit various thresholds for just leveling in general, you’ll unlock additional passive slots.
Both the additional attack slots and passive slots aren’t locked however. You can switch them out with the attacks and passives of other forms that you’ve unlocked.
My maximum zoom horse loadout.
Here’s an example: the slug has one of the lowest base movement speeds in the game, but gets access to an ability that grants it 150% movement speed, and leaves a trail of slime on the ground behind it. You could equip the slug with the generic ability that raises its base movement speed to flat value that can’t be lowered. But you could also take that speed boost ability and put it onto the horse, who has one of the fastest movement speeds in the game, boosting its speed to ridiculous amounts, and traverse the map exceedingly fast. Of course, that still risks you running out of mana, so you’ll equip the ability that lets us spend health as mana, and now you have a turbocharged horse leaving a trail of slime behind it as it rockets across the map.
Maybe that’s not good enough though. Perhaps you want to add the strongman’s passive that makes it so that whenever you would bump into an enemy while slime sliding, you knock them back and deal damage to them if they collide with anything. Maybe you want to add the rat’s passive to build poison on hit, or the dragon’s that increases crit chance against the already slowed enemies.
Nobody Saves the World is absolutely chock full of interactions like this, and it encourages you to use them. Every single form has uses, and is fun to play, giving you a heavy amount of customization while also keeping the forms different through their built in basic attacks, and single locked passive.
And perhaps most importantly, Nobody Saves The World knows this, and it tries to show you these combos and tricks. Many of the quests to rank up a form require you to do something that the form’s basic skills won’t allow, and you have to figure out how to mix and match to best meet that requirement.
In addition, not every trick will work in every dungeon. Some dungeons won’t have healing items. Some dungeons will have enemies that are status immune. In one particularly interesting one, all damage dealt both from and to enemies is multiplied by 9,999, and this dungeon isn’t a gag or a joke! It’s a puzzle to be solved with clever ability usage and munchkin tactics.
There’s a few parts to the combat system I’m not even covering here, such as status effects and elemental wards, but I want to talk about another thing the game does as well.
Purely on its combat alone, Nobody Saves The World would be great. However, in addition to that, it has some incredible art, and great writing. The feel of the world reminds me of something like Gravity Falls: a bright, vibrant place but with some bite to it. There are a lot of fairly funny moments, and also a few pretty powerful ones.
Okay, so let’s wrap this up.
I personally think that the highest form of praise that can be given to any piece of media is to engage with it, and for games that means playing it. For Nobody Saves the World, I played through the whole game, and then started the game’s New Game+ mode, and played through all of that. I’ve hit the game’s level cap, gotten every single Steam achievement, and completed every quest. The game is just incredibly fun, and the world, writing and art is so good that I went out of my way to play the whole thing twice.
Nobody Saves the World is available on Steam, and various consoles. It’s like $25, and its absolutely worth it.
PS: For anyone wondering how the egg could possibly be useful… Despite its incredibly low stats, it has a self heal ability. The heal doesn’t heal too much HP, BUT when you shift forms, your HP % stays the same, and if you equip the “Spend life as mana” passive, you heal more than you take. So you can switch to the egg, heal up to full, and then switch back to another form and be back at max health.
PPS: The second highest form of praise (and probably the first highest if you’re actually the developer) is buying the game for other people. I did that too.
