Steam’s Spring Sale has kicked off! Pinky pointed it out and I immediately went over there to check out the pickings…
10% off… 25% off… 20% off… Hrm. Wait, Nobody Saves the World is 60% off! Ten Bux! Okay. Looking at the screenshots had it remind me of a cartoony Hades (which I *LOVED*) and the reviews were “Very Positive”. Okay. That was enough for me to put it on the wishlist… and 60% is good enough for me to pull the trigger.
The game is pretty fun. Here’s the basic story:
You are this guy:
You wake up in a shed:
You go out into the world and explore a little bit and find out that there are a couple of guards who explain that only a Ranger can get past them… and, since there’s nowhere else to go, you quickly find yourself in a basement with a magic wand:
Checking out your surroundings, you see that the door requires 8 stars to open it and you ain’t got none. How will you ever get out of the basement? Well, by using the aforementioned wand and turning into a rat:
And, by turning into a rat, you now can leave via a different door and you’re playing the game proper.
The main mechanism of the game is that you gain XP by accomplishing things in your various transformations. The rat has an early quest where you have to poison a number of baddies with your bite attack. Go up enough levels as a rat and you unlock the ability to transform into a guard or into a, tah-dah, ranger. The guard has the ability to swing a sword quickly up close, the ranger has the ability to fire arrows from afar. They have quests that involve hitting multiple baddies with attacks and when you complete enough of those quests, you can unlock *MORE* things to transform into.
Much like the rat was able to go into tight spaces, you’ll find other forms that can go past barriers (the turtle, for example, can swim). There are builds that do the best against certain types of monsters and there are monsters that can only have their defense broken by certain types of damage (and while most of your builds don’t do this type, some of your builds do). So you’ll have to get into fights where you’ll switch around your form on the fly.
Start out as a rat! Switch to a guard! Switch to the ranger and dodge, dodge, dodge! And unlock more and more skills for your dudes and unlock more and more dudes and get more and more quests and more and more dungeons and… well, the game is huge and fun and has a *TON* of stuff to do. I can’t believe I paid only $10 for this.
Now… bit of a warning, there is “humor” and here’s an example:
Sigh. But, if you can get past that, there won’t be anything in the game to get you to take a deep breath and sigh. The story kind of takes a back seat once you get going… but there remains an undercurrent of “Who am I? How did I get here?” even as you clean out the various dungeons and figure out how to explore more and more of the map without getting squashed by the various baddies.
If you’ve been wanting a fun Metroidvania ARPG with cute graphics, interesting puzzles, and fun combat, this is one of those games that makes me say “I’m glad I got this on sale but it would have been worth full price”.
So… what are you playing?
