Wanda - A Beautiful Apocalypse Reviews

Good grief, this is awful! There is literally nothing good in the overall experience. Steer clear, even if you think that you'd spend more on a coffee. Otherwise stay tuned for * Non-skippable, excruciatingly long animations * No menu, but only very few options to save the progress * A few tedious, highly unforgivable puzzles, which seem to be taken from popular franchises * Broken controller/Steam Deck option late in the game, because one suddenly needs keyboard inputs

I can't bring myself to give this game a negative rating. Despite its flaws, it's just too beautiful. So clearly a labour of love. The art and music is stunning. The story evokes so many thoughts and feelings without ever saying a word. Not to mention, the puzzles are incredibly well thought out with a lot of unique twists for each puzzle - also, if you get stuck on a puzzle, you get the option to skip it. The problems: - As many have mentioned, the game takes a lot of control away from the player. And it's not just that - it takes the control away from the player for a long time at a time; the cutscenes are a little long-winded. There were many times where I had already gotten the point they were trying to make, but then the cutscene would still go on and on. - I don't know if this is a problem really, it's more of a frustration. Sometimes for some of the puzzles, each move has to be pinpoint-perfect, or else you have no choice but to reset the puzzle. BUT, if you reset it a few times, there's an option to skip the puzzle completely which is awesome. - Sometimes in cutscenes, the dialogue (which we can't read) just runs on a timer and proceeds on its own, and sometimes the player has to click to continue. I think this is inconsistent, and since we can't read what they say anyway, it's pointless to have a system where the player has to progress the dialogue. - There's a bug in the puzzle where [spoiler]blue shrinks. If you reset the puzzle while still holding the orb you have to give to red, the movement speed doesn't reset to normal, it stays slowed as if blue is still carrying the orb[/spoiler]. Ultimately, I would recommend this game. It's cute, it's cheap, and it's short :)

Wanda - A Beautiful Apocalypse is a true gem! As many have said, it has a lot of cutscenes, a short story, and some frustrating puzzles, but the positives outweigh the negatives in my opinion. The hand drawn artstyle of the post-apocalyptic world is beautiful. The music and story telling are very well done. It's about two adorable robots trying to figure out what happened to their world and their journey. As an artist myself, I appreciate the developers vision and what they wanted to acomplish in this game. To be honest, I did not like it at first, then I looked at it for what it is and based my review on those merits. It's short, it's sweet, and for me was a great little game.

If you've read any other comments, you've already seen this at least once, but if you haven't, WARNING: THIS GAME IS EXTREMELY SLOW. There isn't a whole lot of gameplay in this game. It's not a Metal Gear situation, either, where about 50% of the game is awesome cutscene and the other 50% is awesome gameplay. This game could probably last about 2.5 hours on a normal playthrough, and about 80% of that was cutscene. So, let's get down to gameplay and story. First off, this was made in RPG Maker. It's not some amazing thing, but it's not bad, either. You can't move diagonally, or anything fancy. The controls are very simple, and you never have more than four buttons besides the arrow keys (A, S, Z, X) that do anything. So, what's the story? Again, pretty simple: Blue Bot wakes up in a pod. He's drowsy, fading in and out of consciousness, but eventually he breaks the glass pane of his pod and crawls out. And thus, the adventure begins. As Blue Bot, you'll wander the world for a while on your own, then you'll suddenly hear the only other voice in this world. The first puzzle begins: Dig up crystals that will power the teleporter that will hopefully lead you to the source of this new voice. And once there, you meet Blue's companion: Red Bot. So, at this point, I should digress to mention why my play time is lower than the play time I suggested to be an average. It's because the puzzles are optional. Yes, you read that right. 50% of the gameplay (10% of the whole game) is optional. Why? Because this game is supposed to be simple. If the puzzles are too complex for you, like a few of them were for me, or you don't want to spend your time on them, that's alright, you can skip them after a few failed tries, because Wanda isn't intended to be complex. The game's two stories (one told through the cutscenes, and another told through the collectible photgraphs) are very simple as well, using imagery clearly to indicate what's going on in each scene, so you can relate that easily to other scenes. Y'know what, whatever. I'm done trying to be accurate, or sound fancy. I'm recommending this game because it's the most heartwarming experience I've had in the last week or so. I'm a sucker for simplistic storytelling, and as far as that goes, Wanda takes the cake. Wanda isn't even a simple game, really: It's a simple story, told in a relatively simple way. And if you don't love that, that's alright. I did, though, and if you think you would too, this game deserves your money.

[i]Wanda - A Beautiful Apocalypse[/i] is a touching story about two little robots finding each other in a seemingly lifeless world. The graphics of the game are a bit old school, but I found myself enjoying them. Some of the animations were super adorable. It kind of reminded me of the cuteness of To the Moon. Gameplay for [i]Wanda[/i] is pretty simple. You use the arrow keys and Z most of the time. During the puzzles, a few more keys are thrown in. I admit, sometimes I forgot which key went to what, but that's more of a personal problem than something wrong with the game. Now the puzzles in the game are pretty well thought out. I did skip of few of them because I was more into the story, but none of them are unbeatable. The first few are easy, with the rest being a bit more challenging. I'm sure with enough time, anyone can figure them out. Lastly, the music...the original reason I bought this game. The music is very lovely, and fits in well with the game. Usually I turn off the music for video games and listen to my own, but [I] Wanda[/i] isn't really a game you're supposed to do that with. I could listen to the soundtrack all day. It gets a thumbs up from me. In the end, I really enjoyed the story this game told. So if you like stories and puzzles coming together to form something that makes you think a little, I definitely recommend that you pick this little gem up.

Music is beautiful & puzzles were okay, but the pacing is too slow. While you can put together the gist of the story & background lore off of watching the cutscenes, having all the dialogue in the robot language keeps you somewhat disengaged & confused for as much time as the slow & unskippable cutscenes take place. The dialogue does translate to english (each of the robot language characters corresponds to a different letter of the English alphabet), however thats only if youre willing to take the time to manually decipher it yourself. The game having a mode to switch this would keep players a bit more interested & engaged for the cutscene time between puzzles. Very easy to 100%. Also, there is a 100% walkthrough in the guides section that does have the language translated if you wish to read along with that as you play.

Wow, such a disappointment. The story is meaningless, puzzles are boring and juvenile. The graphics? I don't really wanna mention graphics with the game made of RPG making tool, but I strongly recommend you guys to play Masterpiece like "To The Moon" instead of this piece of crap, it is far better game made out of same tool, it still has great heart-warming stories and interesting game play. You can't even skip the cutscene, and they are really, really slow. What's the point if watching all those dialouge when it's alien language that you can't understand a word? I don't even wanna call this a game. It's more like a video. A boring-as-f**k video. I would rather watch a kitty growling in YouTube. The only reason why I played this shit until the end is my stupid obsession to watch the ending once I start anygame. I hated myself every minute I had to put up with this. PLEASE, GUYS, IF YOU THINK YOUR TIME IS VALUABLE, DO NOT PLAY THIS SHIT.

Wanda is 80% cartoon and 20% game. The reason I do not recommend this game is because the description of the game does not portray this and it is sold as a game, which for the most part, it is not. I did not find the long animations between the few puzzles in the game at all interesting or cute (except for all of 2 seconds of one scene). I'm actually writing this while one of them is playing in the background. For what it's worth I did enjoy the puzzle element of the game, although I think the portal one could have been better constructed considering you can't even see all of where you need to go until you shoot blindly and portal yourself there. Only buy this if you want to mostly watch mediocre robot cartoon with no actual language in it and play a few puzzle games along the way. Oh, and the same animation is still playing in the background. I've checked back twice to see if I need to click anything to aid the progress of it (occasionally this is the case).

Wanda is a flawed puzzle adventure game thing. The game commits quite a few design errors. Most of them have to do with taking control away from the player. Instead of letting me explore, it lets my avatar do stuff during cutscenes that I should be doing during exploration, especially since I often get dumped into the very same environment that had the cutscene. And these things are long and boring, they don't really tell me much that I need to know. The puzzles are unoriginal; there was a "flip the lights" type (super easy), and a box pusher with an energy bar that resets when you run out of energy (you do have crystals to replenish your energy, but even if you still can reach one of those, it resets anyway). I explored a scene, got close to the edge, and embarked on another long cutscene with no way to return and maybe finish exploring. 15 minutes of playing left me stuck; I did find a save point and 2 pieces of some image, but there seems to be no way out of that scene. So, in short, I'm stuck, and the game has killed any motivation that might make me get unstuck. I do not recommend this.

Wanda, or, better, Wanda - A Beautiful Apocalypse is a nice puzzle game, quite linear and playable in some hours if you look to a guide here and there (by the way, I followed an Italian guide on another website so I can't refer to Steam user guides this time when I was stuck xD). Written with RPG Maker as a hybrid - it has got RPG elements apart from the puzzle ones - well, I can understand the negative opinions it had but for being an indepentend release, to me it's worth the experience. Plus, the soundtrack and the audio department is great and graphically I found everything good, but this can be a personal opinion. To me it's both backgrounds and normal in-game graphics are nicely drawn and embody the spirit of the game. Ok, just the price is too high, but anyways, I found it -90% so I think it's not a problem in this case if you put it into your wishlist. Back to the game, the RPG elements and the story tells us of two robots (be aware that the game, even if it's short, due to its gameplay and the unskippable cutscenes it's definitely slow and starts to boost up after some time) in a post-apocalyptic world, and they will be your two protagonists - you'll need both to get over puzzles and such. Well, the game itself isn't that polished, it lacks of a proper menu and it doesn't even support the Steam overlay (don't ask me about controller support xD), so that even closing it can be a little frustrating, but as I said it's quite short overall and if you can manage the slowness of it all and enter the atmosphere and the plot you'll have no problems on this side. As I was saying, in my opinion even if the story isn't that emotional, and for sure we're not in front of a masterpiece, you have to be drawn into it and get the links between the two robots.. since only then every puzzle will make more sense, and the whole story with them. Only some of the puzzles anyways will be challenging, while the others sometimes give the sense of being there only in order to get the story going, exploring this desolate world (trust me, the music will be really awesome) and searching for happiness and hope. And this thing comes out with the skip function, not available in any part of the game except for the puzzles, so that even the hardest ones after some tries can be skippable - probably the developer themselves wanted to put everything in the adventure theme rather that in the mere "puzzle" one, although the puzzle element still remains the most important for what concerns the gameplay. I have heard about players who complained about the lack of communication - the robots will talk only with sounds blending with the general splendid music - between the player and the protagonists, but in my opinion if you get into the story it won't disappoint you. It's a matter of understanding that the developers of this game tried to put all of their efforts into the plot, the graphics, the cutscenes and the soundtrack and with that spirit, you'll get through every puzzle without skipping them in order to proceed with the story. Which as I said, is overall not that long. I definitely can't agree with reviews and opinions that keep on comparing games to previous, or different games. Of course, I lived the '90s in their prime and I watched as the first generations of videogames were coming out at an extreme slow rate, there were no independent developers and we had to pay lots of money for every cartridge since there wasn't even the Internet. So, I think that everything must be judged with lots of contextualization, since this game came out in 2016 and of course being indie it drew many ideas from other games. The puzzles, with the forced use of two characters (you will of course swap rapidly between them in order to solve the riddles), aren't new, it's a concept used in tons of Flash games before even talking about greater RPGs and such. Judged into this game, into this story, into the post-apocalyptic robotic planet, they're good in my view and they're not blatantly copied but they have originality and well, if you don't like all of them, they can be skipped :) If you're into a puzzle RPG with lots of narrative and emotive elements, and if you think that you'll want to spend some afternoons diving into the game's atmosphere, in my opinion this game deserves to be bought and played despite its flaws, not only due to RPG Maker's limitations but also other aspects I covered and the developers could have improved. Still, a refreshing and nice title to play with audio full on :)