i can't go to hell - i'm all out of vacation days. i watch space rocks and yell at computers for my day job. probably too old for any of this

 

i think i might be burned out on internet social. it's hard to keep doing it. it's hard to even maintain the amount of attention i'm already giving it

 

i am the cause of most of my own problems

 

furthermore, capitalism must be destroyed

 

birdsona: ?????

 

🌎 Ontario, Canada


webbed site
egrets.ca/

amdusias
@amdusias

Worldless is a 2023 Metroidvania from Barcelona's Noname Studios, their debut. The footage in the gif above is from a youtuber named chobijas, thanks!


I knew little about Worldless before wishlisting it, but it was sold as a surrealist turn-based Metroidvania, and everything about that appeals to me, even though the other turn-based Metroidvania that so many of my friends seem to love didn't really do it for me. (That would be Monster Sanctuary.)

It turns out that this game pushed approximately 90% of my buttons perfectly and the remaining 10% utterly whiffs (that remaining 10% is largely "the plot", but...we'll get there.)

Everything about this game is V I B E S to a peerless degree. The environments are gorgeous, the soundtrack is gorgeous, it is impossible not to feel extremely cool in combat with how fluid everything is (even at 10fps the gif attached to this post looks cool). Even the map is vibes: unlike a typical Metroidvania, you absolutely do not get more here than "there's a boss vaguely uppish-rightish and also you missed an item leftish somewhere", with a hub area in the center of the map that lets you wander out into the various side areas. Exploring is a joy, and I never found myself lost despite how very abstract everything is.

I described this to one of my partners (@durra-gaaz) as "[her name]-core", as Worldless strikes a weird balance, someone trying to appeal half to fans of a game like Journey or Knytt or Seiklus (lol I'm old) and half to fans of Bayonetta. Every fight is a dance: on offense, you are shown a list of weaknesses (you can see "magic" and "physical" in the gif, because that's an early encounter, it gets a LOT more complicated) that you need to exploit all of to some degree before you can deal meaningful damage, and on defense, you're being shown "magical attack", "physical attack", or "big fuck you scary attack" and guarding with the appropriate button. Blocks within a small number of frames no-sell the attack completely, but you can always just hold down the appropriate block button, though you'll eventually get your guard broken and take a bit of damage anyway if you don't feel like playing a rhythm game.

Exploiting weaknesses raises an "absorption" bar, and when it's over a certain point, you can bap both shoulder buttons to try to absorb the enemy, which is effectively a QTE...except that the lower the meter is when you try this, the more buttons in the QTE will just be labeled ?. Bosses can only be killed by absorbing them, regular enemies also have health bars, but absorbing enemies gives you skill points, so you'll want to find every enemy and absorb them anyway, because not having all of your skills makes your life miserable here. (There are zero random encounters; if you kill an enemy you wanted to absorb, it just leaves a little statue you can interact with to refight it until you absorb it successfully to get its point.)

I have written three paragraphs about the combat system and exploration, so it's at this point that I say that the only real problem that I have with this game, if any, is that the plot is also V I B E S to a hilarious degree. At some point, I found the game's equivalent of "hey there's new stuff in all the areas, revisit them", and found some newly added bosses in a few of the areas. I went back to the hub world and oh, hey, there's a glowy guy here now. I talked to the glowy guy and was thrown into a boss fight with a giant unkillable mandala after which the credits rolled. I said "uh, I guess I just beat it, but that seemed like an obviously bad ending" to one of my partners, they asked "do you want me to see if there's another ending" and they came back with "yeah, you didn't fight a couple of bosses but there's no other ending, people seem to think the game just ends mid-thought". So, that's frustrating, but...when everything else gets nailed so well, I still really recommend this to people wanting something a bit off the beaten path. I really really enjoyed it.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @amdusias's post:

Pinned Tags