World to the West

Charming with a great soudtrack, but very repetative. I normally love these types of games, but I found the controls frustrating and the world itself too simple (and somewhat bland). Too bad as I would have loved to play this game for many more hours. I never finished it (played for about 4 hours), so perhaps it gets better later in the game.

Great game and really enjoyable after playing Teslagrad. It can really immerse you more if you paid attention to the previous game from the same team. Check every bit of text from this game to tie both stories and get surprised. The game seems to have some bugs which they don't break the game but simple graphical problems. The ending felt a bit weak in the story side, and after all the tablets/batteries collected there didn't feel like you unlocked something very important. As a single player game it would have been good to have a multiplayer with all those unique characters. All of their stories are great and you expect them to be intertwined, but you still get surprised how they do. The music is very pleasurable to every area of the game suiting the mood and never getting tired when adventuring or searching for the batteries. Overall a very good game which can be played and get very absorbed into it without feeling tired to get the same experience all the time. It can be easy sometimes but challenging for others since it lacks some training when you get new power-ups, but it is all part of the gameplay experience.

World to the West is a surprisingly well made game with substantial content. In its core it's a 3D action adventure with Metroidvania elements. The main focus is on exploring the large world with four characters by using their unique abilities - which they need to gain in the first third (or so) of the game. The graphics are cartoonish and remind of Zelda Windwaker. Which means they aren't really top notch but still pleasant to look at (most of the time). The view is fixed, so you can't look around which feels limiting at first for a PC game, but I guess it's OK for this kind of game. Unfortunately, the keyboard controls are somewhat sluggish and even buggy. E.g. when entering a new map area, the game forgets about keys being pressed and you need to release them to unstuck them. Generally, this is not a major issue but some of the boss fight are much harder due to the sluggishness. I stumbled over some more bugs but nothing really game breaking. The (surface) world is really large plus there's an underground world that's only a little smaller. The world is separated into relatively small areas though with a checkpoint every few areas. These checkpoints also serve as teleporters and allow to swap your characters, There are 36 secret tablets hidden in the world but you can buy hints later on to mark them on the (pretty good) map. The story is forgettable, the enemies are canon fodder and the boss fights mainly annoying but where the game really shines is using the specific abilities of your characters to discover the world, solving some puzzles and opening paths for your comrades. The designers took some shortcuts though by duplicating abilities (some obstacles can be removed by two or even three characters). All in all, it's a pretty decent action adventure which lacks some polish here and there to be really top notch. I put 27h in it and cursed it only a few times during boss battles. So for me, it was well spent money especially since I got it on sale.

You have to hold down buttons to keep the camera on the character, otherwise the view defaults to a terminally close shot of the character at the very edge of the screen. I thought maybe I was missing something, but when I investigated, I found that the buttons for it were literally labeled "pan (right/left/up/down)." Not sure how it will be for others, but the game also defaulted to a square screen shape for me and I had to change it to wide screen in the options. Sadly, that didn't help with the camera angle. This game appears to have been released in 2017, so I'm not sure why it would do that, especially in combination with the bad camera angles. Because of this combination of things, I was unable to make it more than 10 minutes into the game before giving up. If the camera situation was better, I think this is a game I would love to play and the soundtrack is fantastic.