What’s this thing in my Steam library? v3.0 – World to the West

The gaming lull at the beginning of the year has allowed me to return to my semi-regular column, “What’s this thing in my Steam Library?”. As a regular Humble Bundle consumer, as well as a subscriber to the monthly mystery bundle, I have amassed a giant collection of games in my Steam account, many of which I have never heard of. Rather than just letting things accumulate with no intention of ever playing most of my list, I figured that occasionally, I would randomly pick an unfamiliar title and take it for a spin. So, this weekend, I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the list and discovered…

World to the West

Released in May of 2017, World to the West marks developer Rain Games’ return to the world of Teslagrad (another game in my Steam library I’ve never played). While I am unfamiliar with the storyline of the franchise, I did recognize the art style from articles about Teslagrad I’ve read online. However, I’m unable to contrast the two games, due to my ignorance of the first.

World to the West is a Zelda-style puzzle/exploration game with something of a twist. Instead of controlling one solitary character on a quest to save the princess, the player has four unique characters at their disposal, each with their own motivations and abilities. One character has a “zip” move, allowing her to teleport forward over short gaps. A second has a cool “dig-dug” ability, which allows him to go underground, passing beneath certain obstacles and stealthing past enemies. This guy is also rather diminutive in size, allowing him to pass through tunnels that the others won’t fit through. The third character has a scarf that she can use to grapple to new areas at designated points. Very early in the game, she gains the ability to take control of enemies, using them for exploration or throwing them to their deaths to clear the way for herself. The last character is a brute, specializing in combat and able to smash rocks to open pathways.

The attractive game world is fairly open, allowing the player to use these different abilities, combining them to solve clever environmental puzzles and progress forward. I enjoyed the opening couple of hours, playing as the individual characters before they came together as a group. However, once the characters were all unlocked and able to work together, I began to see some cracks in the design of World to the West.

My issue stems from the system the game employs to allow the player to switch between characters. This can only be done at certain points on the map (represented as totem poles), and switching between characters takes you to that character at the totem pole where you last played them. To make this problem clearer, at one point I was able to take my little dig-dug dude and run him way out in front of the rest of the group. His abilities allowed him to pass certain barriers that were blocking the other characters. No problem, I would just look for a key to open up a door for the others, right? Well, once I did that, I had to find a totem pole, then transfer to the other characters one by one and move them forward through the same area. This creates a certain amount of drudgery.

To further exacerbate the issue, at one point I had my dig-dug dude forging ahead as usual, and I decided to check what was going on down in a cave. This turned out to be a grave error, as the cave was full of enemies and Dig-Dug has very minimal combat abilities. My guy was able to hide underground, but there were no totem poles that I could reach in the cave, and there was no clear way out. With no totem pole, I was unable to switch to my other characters to come save Dig-Dug. This resulted in a frustrating non-game-over-but-no-clear-way-to-progress state that eventually forced me to shut down my playthrough and start over. Obviously, I moved forward with each character more cautiously in my second playthrough, but the fact that the game allowed me to strand myself was a bit startling.

I would enjoy this game far more if players were able to change characters on the fly, but this would break most of the puzzle design of the game. In the end, I had to acknowledge that, though I was enjoying aspects of the experience, perhaps this was just not the game for me.

There are some great things to recommend in World to the West, however, for fans of the genre. The visuals are very pleasant, with a nice colorful and cartoonish look to them. The sound design is good, and the music is better than good, bordering on awesome. The characters are a lot of fun, too, with a witty writing punctuating the story. World to the West made me chuckle more than once during my time with it.

While I can’t say that I will continue with World to the West, it was certainly an entertaining and pleasant way to spend a weekend morning. For puzzle fans and Zelda fanatics, I would definitely say that this game is worth a look. Even though in the end it wasn’t completely my jam, there is still a lot to admire and enjoy in World to the West.