The Wonderful End of the World Review

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People are talking about some bizarre katamari thing. I do not know what it is. Is this some sort of Japanese fish dish? The point being, what is the point of a game if it is on a platform on which nobody plays with? Thus this game has no competition. Backwards compactability is just one thing out of many why console peasants are incomparable to PC games.

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That this company, Dejobaan games brings you quality games for 75 years? I did not knew it to, but it is in the intro. In fact, there is a lot of cool stuff just before you start playing this game. Game has a fun intro song which ties into main character, you and what you are doing. It is wonderfully done song which is masterfully woven into this game.

Game is simple. Eat smaller objects. Grow. Eat larger objects until you become the biggest. It is simple game where you have to find the most efficient route to grow the quickest. Game is fairly short, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome with simple mechanics. It can take few tries to complete a level with highest score and some levels are notoriously difficult, but it is doable to achieve in half an hour the best score if you have one functioning brain.

Improvements

1. The only thing which I had missed are levels which allows you to scale a lot. It might be an engine limitation, but game is pretty limited in how much you can eat before completing entire level. You can’t eat a lot of small objects when you scale out of control nor you can scale into ridiculous levels.
   
   
2. Another issue which I had is that when you try to complete time based challenges, I did struggled with two things. As you grew, it was unclear if you can eat an object until you waste time coming to that object and bumping awkwardly back. Thus wasting your precious time and getting annoyed. It then reveals engine flaw as it hasn’t any way of determining what you can eat. Only what developers wrote on text file. This arbitrary number often leads to you being unable to consume smaller objects and vice versa, being able to consume bigger objects a lot sooner than you would expect.
   
   
3. Also, as you grow bigger, you might end up bumping into massive objects which you cannot eat. Then you will awkwardly turn around and lose control for a second until animation is finished. It feels very annoying and can be frustrating. Game also slows down as you become bigger and traversal becomes frustrating as you are racing against the clock in a slow character trying to eat fewer and fewer objects which you might or might not be able to eat since you can’t tell that just by looking at them.

I played a demo for a bit long time ago and since then I wanted to come back to this game. I enjoyed game a lot back then, thought it to be original and full of soul, creativity. I found it fun and creative up to this day. Even if it is simple, one-man indie game by today’s standards, what sets it apart is that you can see that developers clearly cared and they tried to make a fun game.

I did enjoyed growing mechanic. At first you start at someone’s garden. As you eat small objects you gradually grow until you break out of a garden into an yard. You start consuming ever bigger objects until the house itself doesn’t seem massive. Then you go on the rampage as last seconds is usually where you start scalling out of control, eating entire neighborhoods in a desperate attempt to just get a little higher score. You can feel growth of your character and shift of scale.

This is something which a lot of game struggle when trying to implement scale. Armored Core, Planetary Anhilliation try to do scale. However they fail at it since they forget one simple thing. In order to get feeling of scale you need two things:

• A size comparison;
• A small world;

These games fail at one or both of those aspects like every similar game which I saw. First of all, world in which you play must not scale with you. You won’t feel big if you scale game’s asset with character. Also you need to establish a size comparison. If your character is huge, you must have ordinary units small. This could be done by having one big unit and normal comparison units small. For example, you want to show how big tank is? You give player a normal infantry man which serves to establish scale. Then you bring a tank which is many times bigger. Most games fail at this, because:

• Tank is not up to scale;
• Environment is not up to scale;

World around you will be made bigger. Thus, you will feel equally small. Even if you make environment small, it will create feeling of playing in a sandbox since everything else will be just as big. The Wonderful End of the World and Psychonauts and Dark Souls are the only games I know which did scale well. Even the fact that I have to bring up games which fail at scale is a reason why we should call out game designers as frauds and bring them back to programming.

There isn’t much to say about this game. It is short. It is simple. It is well crafted where entire story leads to the last level when world actually ends. Achievements are also interactive, well one at least is. A simple game often avoids perils of more complex or longer games when some mechanic in them breaks. Thus it is just better to play this game than spend more time reviewing or reading reviews than it would take to complete a small an hour or two adventure.

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