World to the West Reviews

As a huge fan of Teslagrad to the point where I became a significant member of its speedrunning community, I was looking forward to playing World to the West more than most people. Does it live up to the hype? Here's my review. The number one question of Teslagrad fans is, how does this compare to Teslagrad? Number one, it is much brighter and lighter than the dark themes that Teslagrad held. It is fully in 3D with very vivid, cartoony graphics. Some beautiful hand-painted scenes appear in some places as well. Number two, there are still puzzle platform mechanics, but it should be viewed more as an homage to Legend of Zelda in that you will frequently need certain items and different character abilities to navigate the terrain and the main objective areas. Number three, the game opens up as a fully dialouged, storylined action adventure akin to Secret of Mana, not at all like the wordless pictoral storytelling that Teslagrad did. The map is large and double layered, with a bright overworld and a spooky underground littered with tunnels and caves. There is a bustling town where you can talk to nearly everyone, and a crazy old lady drives the main plot. The overall game is much longer, slower, and more storied than Teslagrad, which is a turn-off to a speedrunner's mindset. Number four, however, is that the game will frequently remind you that you are in the same universe as Teslagrad. You have a Teslamancer as one of the four main playable characters, with familiar abilities. While you are no longer in Electropia, you find people from the neighboring countries, Mesmer and Motorland, and get to see how they interact and what they think of Teslamancers. Jørn Lavoll delivers a superb soundtrack, which includes many references to music from Teslagrad. And of course, we can't forget the hidden scroll collecting. Many reminders from Teslagrad wait to be discovered and appreciated. Now, the next question. How does this fare as a standalone game for people who have never seen Teslagrad? Overall, you can't help but compare it to Legend of Zelda. It feels very much like it, but is still quite fun in its own way. Since it is from a small Norwegian indie game developer, you can't expect it to be as huge as Breath of the Wild. But it's also one-quarter of the price. The opening chapters of the game introduce you to the main characters one by one, occasionally crossing paths, until late game when they all converge together and you are then allowed to freely roam. Until that point, the game feels a bit constrained and scripted. At first the characters are physically constrained from roaming, with obstacles they can't clear until acquiring special items later on. And even then, at one particular point after acquiring a new item and attempting to go back and explore with it, I was annoyed at the old lady literally stopping me and saying "No, you can't explore yet, go do your quest first." Another point some people may not like is that there are checkpoints throughout the world where you can teleport from point to point, but each character cannot teleport to a checkpoint unless they have personally visited it already, so there's quiite a bit of travel needed because you essentially need to traverse the world four times, once with each character, to acquire a sufficient set of checkpoints for each one. The main objective areas require the combined might of all four characters, so hauling each one to each area is a bit of a slog, but it can also be treated as a challenging puzzle because each character needs to take a slightly different path governed by their ability to circumvent obstacles. So there are often times when you see a shiny thingy you want to reach, and say to yourself, "Well, only that character can reach it. Now how do I get them all the way over here?" Overall I give World to the West a big thumbs up. To me, Teslagrad is Rain's Hobbit, and World to the West is their Lord of the Rings. A heavily expanded and richer gaming experience. I can't wait to see what's next.

This is a great indie gem if you're someone who likes the top-down gameplay style of the 2D Zelda games, like Link to the Past, Link Between Worlds etc, which also happens to be a sequel to the (mostly) great Teslagrad. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] World to the West takes place in an open, metroidvania style world, where you slowly gain access to more of the map as you unlock the 4 characters and upgrade their powers. The gameplay is more complex than other reviews have given it credit for. Like Zelda, most of the game is spent solving "puzzles", but these aren't necessarily in your face puzzle rooms like Teslagrad. Generally you know you need to get from point A to point B, or find an item in point B, and to do that you need to solve some subtle environmental puzzles using the 4 characters (or a subset of those). The complexity comes from the way the developers nave cleverly spread abilities over all the characters, so that there is some overlap of some abilities, and other powers are unique. To solve these puzzles you generally need to find the one character or sequence of characters that have the abilities you need at the time. In addition to the main storyline, there are a [i]lot[/i] of collectibles to find: 36 scrolls, a similar amount of health upgrades, and then maybe 100 money chests strewn around the map. These were my favourite part of the game, not only because I'm a completionist, but also because these allowed the environmental puzzles to shine: you really have to think about how the spaces are designed, and which parts stand out as something that can be exploited by a given character. In addition, the game has save points which serve as fast travel spots. Others have complained that each character must individually find these to enable teleporting, but I think this is a clever addition to the game that in some cases makes you solve the same environmental puzzle in 4 different ways in order to access all the treasures available to each character in each area. The combat was entirely serviceable for those used to Zelda's combat: each character has a main attack button along with up to 3 other abilities that might have some combat application. Combat comes into focus during some interesting boss fights and certain arena fight gates, but is otherwise not a huge portion of the game. [h1]Music[/h1] I found this game's music to be diverse and interesting. No particular track was so good that I would buy the soundtrack, but I remember enjoying it as I played! [h1]Story[/h1] At face value, the story was very bland: four heroes are prophesied to be able to beat the bad guy and his plot to destroy the world, so they have to find key items to stop him. Pretty uninspired. On the other hand, it was a nice opportunity for the devs to explore the interesting cultures present in the world of Teslagrad, including the mind-controlling Mesmer, the engineers from Motorland, the electric Teslamancers from the first game, and others. However, the game isn't set in any of these countries. The Mesoamerican-inspired native people of the titular "West" have a pleasantly developed history, but the game seems to sideline them for some reason, and decides that the (white) foreigners need to save their country for them, which is a bizarre decision that could so easily be avoided by including them in the playable party, as well as coming up with a better reason why they can't save themselves except for "prophecy". So story is probably the game's weakest part. [h1]Graphics[/h1] World to the West has simple but cute graphics. They're not amazing, and aren't awe-inspiring like Teslagrad, but I really have no issue with them. Check out the screenshots to see what I mean [h1]Linux[/h1] It supports Linux! And it runs without issues! Great job, devs!

Incredibly good metroidvania game. You have 4 characters and each has a different move set. Like in Astalon Tears of the Earth you have to get to checkpoints to switch characters, except here each character has to get to a checkpoint themselves. Which makes the level design much more interesting and unlocking shortcuts much more rewarding. 10/10 game. Would mind control squirrles again.

I impulse bought this game not knowing anything about it and I haven't looked back. I played a short time, and it's really fun. For some reason it reminds me of animal crossing for the movement and play style but with Zelda mixed in. It's very smooth. Challenging and beautiful. The sound track is amazing in my opinion and in total is very relaxing. My one complaint is the default key binds and making the attempt to bind up a controller but that's minor. No biggy.

This is a Zelda game that is simply too easy to be very interesting to me. A lot of backtracking and the like too with a too slow walking speed for the size of the map. I wonder if I would have had more patience for it if everything had just been sped up. But 5.7 hours was enough time for me.

Fun, charming, and worth playing, not without some serious problems. [h1]Pros[/h1] [list] [*] Big open world with lots of secrets to explore. [*] Super great music. [*] Clever mechanic with multiple caracters exploring the same spaces. [*] Lots of rewarding puzzles. [/list] [h1]Cons[/h1] [list] [*] Frustrating and slugglish combat. Enemies with dumb AI. Most enemies not worth fighting. [*] [i]Incredibly buggy.[/i] I had to force-quit or reload more times than I remember. [*] Lousy boss fights. [/list] The game in general feels rushed and lacking polish. There are so many bugs, and not just random glitches or crashes. But I have a list of reproducable easy to find problems that I could report to the developers to fix. Menus and dialogs clumsy in a way it felt like it wasn't playtested. But is was still worth a play through. The map is large and it felt rewarding to take the four characters through the same areas and solve the puzzles differently each time. Visual style is beautiful and the music is on point.

This is really disappointing. Not just after how great Teslagrad was, but on its own merits or lack thereof. The game advertises itself as a Cookie and Cream style thing where you switch between characters so they can assist each other in advancing, but it's more like Donkey Kong 64 where you're just playing the same area four times in a vacuum with minimal impact on each other. Most chapters you don't even have control of more than one character, and only the final chapter lets you use all four at all. You're only allowed to switch characters at sparse fast travel points, which massively limits the capacity of puzzles; most of what actually happens is one character going off to do their own thing at a time, largely isolated from any impact of the others. The rare exception usually just means schlepping one other character through trivial areas you already cleared out to open one door, and then back a couple screens to get to the fast travel to swap back -- and since fast travel points are unlocked per character and not shared, that often means schlepping them across large trivial chunks of the [i]entire world map[/i] that you already cleared out. Worse, the fast travel points are only visible when viewing the map from one, so locating one can be a pain even if you've already unlocked it. Combat and boss fights are disappointing as well. Where Teslagrad's bosses were pseudo-puzzles that used your cool puzzle powers to either do indirect damage or create openings, these are mostly just a point and click adventure where the only solution is "use attack button on guy" with...very little thought or finesse, and almost no use of the characters' actual abilities. The difficulty is more jank than depth. All of this comes to a head when the final chapter suddenly springs a required collectathon of the game's hidden items on you for no particular reason. Teslagrad did the same at the very end, and while a bit rude it wasn't too much of burden because they could be found organically throughout the game and there was a simple central hub to quickly explore. Here, almost none of them are even accessible until the final chapter, as the entire game beforehand was on fairly tight rails and doesn't permit characters to venture out much until the last minute. So you're left with having to suddenly explore the entire world map all at once, so large that the main game up till then used barely a third of it if that, and so empty that there's nothing else of worth to do but collectathon, [i]four times[/i]. Upon finding enough of them to progress, the door opens to immediately present another door barely ten feet behind it that demands more of them. It's a shame because there's a neat world and lore going on, but the game just does very little with it and goes out of its way to be tedious.

My main gripe with this game is how it's structured. I'm sure a lot of people really like how there's 4 characters that each have different abilities, but personally I didn't like it that much. In Zelda, you just have Link, and an area you can't access means "come back later when you have the hookshot", for example. In this, an area you can't access means "come back later as a different character." That is fine, and all, except you end up exploring the same world as different characters who traverse it only a little differently from each other. You can't use totems you unlock on one character, as another one. Scarf girl finds a totem, and only she can teleport to it. And the first few hours of the game, at least, are populated with "get these two characters from point A to point B", except they might only barely help each other solve puzzles if at all. It's just "here's one puzzle, solve it twice". Now maybe, later in the game, the puzzles get more complex, and require teamwork, but I wasn't really enjoying the game enough to justify sitting through it until that point. I'd also prefer if the totems did not exist as anything other than save points, and you could just swap between available characters on the fly. It's kind of a huge pain to run around with each character to unlock the totem for them. But I realized that if that were the case, there would be no real reason to even keep 4 seperate characters at all. Anyway, the game looks nice, and connects to Teslagrad, which is cool, so totally go for it if you think you'll like it. I didn't, though. Also I loaded a save and lost a solid hour of progress, so that sucked.

"World to the West" is an Indie-RPG made by the Norwegian game studio Rain Games. My class and I was lucky enough to meet the team and visit their studio in Bergen, Norway, in October 2016. They let us play-test a demo of the game, and give constructive feedback to help them improve the game even further. Pros (+): + Great story + The characters are charming, well-developed and looks good (my personal favourite must be Lord Clonington) + Magnificent graphics, awesome art-wise + The game has about 20-25 hours of gameplay (If you're a completionist like me, hunting for achievements) + Tons of exploration, not just limited to the main story + Big map + Price is not too big, nor too small, got it on Steam's Summer Sale though + Superb, original and neat soundtrack Cons (-): - Story is a bit too short, in my opinion - I still don't like the font (told the developers I didn't like it too) - Combat system can be a bit... "buggy" at times - I got stuck some places, due to the lack of pin-pointers on where to go next - A bit annoying having to lead one character to a saving place, then switch character and lead another one to the same saving place (A bit repetitive in that way) So if you like RPGs, Indie-games, tons of exploration and a neat story, I'd recommend buying "World to the West".

If you like adventure games with a more joyful and childish tone, you should definitely try this game. This game has a lot to it: - Adventure: The game has a nice story, and quite a bit of dialogue. - Puzzle: You solve challenging puzzles, where you have to find clever ways of using the abilities of each character. - Fun gameplay: Each character has different abilities that are fun to use. This adds a lot of variety to the game, so that you won't get bored over time. - A rich world: You travel through a rich world filled with fascinating creatures and different kinds of people. The game really has its own style. The tone of the game is joyful and playful, like some of the old classic RPG games I played as a child (FF9, etc.). The world is very vivid, and filled with cute creatures. Also, the music really fits with well together with the rest of the game. This is the kind of game I will probably feel nostalgic when I play again in a few years.