Many Welps

Time To Finish: 14.25 hours

I haven’t done one of these in almost a year. Has it really been a year since I beat a single player game? There might have been one last year that I beat and didn’t write about. But yeah, it’s been about a year since I completed a game.

World to the West has been on my to play list for a very long time. I’m not exactly sure how it ended up in my library. A bundle no doubt. I’ve started and stopped it many times and had accumulated 2.5 hours in it according to Steam. But I’ve wanted to sink more time in to it because I there was a lot to like about it. I remember the writing being funny, the graphics were nice and cartoony, and the gameplay was fun. But I never got around to it.

World to the West is the standalone sequel to Teslagrad. I vaguely remember playing Teslagrad as one of my first PS Plus free games many years ago. I had no problem following the story here and actually don’t feel the need to play through Teslagrad after finishing this one.

Now that I’ve gotten around to playing it all the way through I can confidently say “I should have done this sooner!”

Things I Liked:

The Gameplay: Always important to like the gameplay of a game right? There are 4 characters each with their own movement set and each character is needed to progress through the map. I loved finding all the different ways of getting one character from one teleporter to another. I also found that unlocking locations and finding batteries gave me that “one more turn” feel.

Usually, with puzzle games there’s a certain point where they seem to get really complicated. This didn’t happen in World to the West which could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. For me, I felt like there was just enough challenge where it felt good to figure something out but not too much to break the flow of the game.

Overall, I found the gameplay itself totally engaging. I even went through and collected all of the batteries on the map for the achievements. Something I never do!

The Writing: Big props to the writer here for the dialogue alone. There were plenty of times I laughed reading through the dialog in this game. The story itself was pretty straight forward but the way the characters and NPC’s talked to each other made me want to see every conversation.

The Music: Each area of the map has it’s own track. The tracks are long enough between repeats that it doesn’t get annoying to listen to. Which is great considering there are a lot of times I found my self backtracking or getting stuck figuring out an area. I even found myself bouncing along to some of the tracks as I played. I especially like the one that plays in the tavern in Carte Blanche: Ukulele of Time. I went in that tavern just to hear that song anytime I was in town….I’ll probably listen to this entire soundtrack on it’s own a number of times.

Things That Could Have Been Better:

Boss Fights: The only thing I didn’t like about this game were the boss fights. The controls work great for the puzzle/exploration portion of the game but feel clunky when doing the action oriented boss fights. I was playing with a controller and found it hard to aim quickly or get out of the way when I needed to. Because of this, I had to repeart fights 3-4 times before I understood what I was suppose to do and do it quick enough to beat the encounter. It really put a stop in the flow of the game every time one came up.