Saturday Morning Gaming: More Nobody Saves The World

I’ve been playing a lot more Nobody Saves The World since I first talked about it last week and the game continues to delight.

There’s a lot of really rich stuff the game pulls off. For one thing, the individual builds *FEEL* different. Sure, the first two fighters they give you after the Rat are the Guard and the Ranger and those both fight as you would expect. The Guard does somewhat heavy damage up close and the Ranger does somewhat less damage from a distance. But then they start throwing weirder builds at you. The Magician does melee damage with his “pick a card” attack (Jacks do damage, Queens do more, Kings do even more, and Aces do the most) but his specialty is summoning familiars to run ahead and fight monsters for you. The Horse kicks behind himself. The slug shoots tears in front of him but leaves a trail of slime behind. The Ghost has a ring of mild-but-continuous damage all around him.

The magician, around the time that he gets familiars, also gets a skill called “Explosive Familiars” that results in, you guessed it, your familiars blowing up when they die. And, yes, doing damage. “Light” damage, to be exact.

There are four kinds of damage in the game. Sharp and Blunt as well as Light and Dark. The Rat, for example, does Dark damage with his bite. The Ranger does Sharp damage with her bow. When you equip “Explosive Familiars”, the familiars do Light damage when they die.

Which brings us to how some of the monsters have Wards. Like, they don’t take any damage at all unless it comes from a particular type. The first such monsters you meet have Sharp wards (which is easy to deal with… just switch to the Ranger or the Guard!) but one of the early dungeons had monsters that had wards against Blunt damage as well as monsters that had wards against Light. Now, each of the creatures I had could do one but none could do both.

UNTIL I REALIZED THAT THEY INCLUDED A MECHANIC TO TUNE EACH INDIVIDUAL CREATURE YOU CAN PLAY.

Check this out:

Sure, I have a base attack and a secondary (in this example, the horse’s ability to kick behind and his trample ability) but I can add attacks from other stuff I’ve unlocked. So I can have my horse summon familiars and then, when the familiars die, they blow up and do light damage:

If you add a skill to let your attacks do dark damage (in addition to their default blunt damage) and a third attack to do sharp damage, your creature can break any wards they happen to come across!

But given that the foundation of each build is different, it’s not like you can just add summon familiar to any given creature and play the same way. The Horse has a fairly fast speed as it gallops around any given dungeon. The Ghost moves slowly (but can float over water). The Bodybuilder is somewhere in between. The Horse’s primary damage is to kick behind itself, the Ghost does mild-but-continuous damage in a circle around itself. The Bodybuilder hits a short cone in front of himself with a pretty heavy barbell. And each one of those might be just what you need for any given dungeon.

Just this very morning, I found myself banging my head against a particular dungeon again and it was only after I unlocked the Necromancer was I finally able to complete it.

It’s not just an ARPG beat-em-up combat game. It’s also a puzzle game. I have to figure out how to best use the tools that I have to beat this or that dungeon or this or that mission and some of the require *VERY* precise combinations of this creature as well as a skill from another build and you have to use them together. There are probably combos that wouldn’t quickly come to you and so the game “cheats” a little bit on your behalf by giving you missions where, for example, you have to use the horse’s gallop with the turtle or use the Mermaid’s tail swipe with the Bodybuilder.

Soften them up over here, then hit them with the old razzle-dazzle.

And sometimes it’s impossible until it isn’t. And that’s *REALLY* rewarding. This is a good game. And it keeps revealing new stuff to me.

So… what are you playing?