There is a kind of innocence in some humor, an innocence that it needs to function. You realize this when you think of Guacamelee, Drinkbox’s big hit on PS Vita – a game with these weird things called “memes”, a game whose name is a pun. I think we probably wouldn’t like a game with memes in 2021 – they’re familiar now and a little strangely important, so you lose your innocence. But Drinkbox maintained its innocence elsewhere with Nobody Saves the World. It is another silly game, but also apparently very good, which is based first on humor and the intelligent evolution of the genre right behind, and another game called with a pun.
You play as someone called Nobody in Nobody Saves the World, who drops Guacamelee’s metroidvania fighting suit (except for some familiar chicken-sized tunnels) into the fantastic mantle of a dungeon-crawling action RPG. It is not the genre I expected after hitting Guacamelee, but it is the result of the studio wanting to remain “engaged and creative”, as chief designer Ian Campbell said, and the result is a game that looks the same: energetic and zippy and full of pressure.
No one saves the world – ad trailer
There are small twists in the genre. The first is that No one saves the world was created to exchange “forms” instantly. Nobody is the blank and comically useless canvas of a character who takes a special wand, whose wave allows you to become one of the forms that Campbell says are 17 or 18 available at the moment (“we are trying to do more, but that is the that we have now “), each a little ridiculous and purposefully” out of the way “. I took over my first dungeon like a rat, for example, with some poisonous attacks and rodents, and then I unlocked a fairly common ranger, followed by a strange, much less common magician who summons familiar rabbits and pokes people with a fan of cards. There’s a horse, and so on (I’m not selling it as a laugh, I’m aware! But sometimes the humor is just levity and the Drinkbox has a magic touch).
The ARPG side of things is traditional, at first glance, asking you to progress through the upper world as you go through your separate dungeons, but the Drinkbox twist is that you complete small goals or missions, however, instead of grinding. In practice, it doesn’t look much different – you make your way through X number of enemies, clear a large dungeon, or summon Y magic rabbits, and this gives you some points with which you unlock more characters, more skills, and so on ( including the “stars” needed to progress to new parts of the upper world), but the real process is still the same: playing more, getting more.
But the game is fun! And the process is part of it, fueling that lovable, more virtuous and more attractive RPG cycle. Each character has its own unique set of skills and passives that complement each other (a mouse bite also poisons, another skill detonates anything poisoned), but later on you gain the ability to mix and match. This combines with enemies that start to gain shields, or “wards”, that require specific types of damage – dark, explosive, etc. – before they are vulnerable to damage of any other kind, and now you have to think. Dungeons warn you about what kind of protection is ahead, so you can decide to put the mouse’s bite on your ranger or engage the ability to summon rabbits with whatever you do with the horse.
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In addition to the nonsense, obviously, these are systems: adequate synergy and min-maxing and all the things that consume a happy life that come with a suitable ARPG. Staying with the Mage, for example, there is an ability that allows you to sacrifice one of your family members for an attack boost, and an ability that makes them explode with little life or death, and one that heals them as they do damage – so you can summon and explode a rabbit to cause damage, obtain an increase in damage, which gives the rest an increase in healing, and so on. All of this feeds the cycle of unlockings and conclusions and progression of missions, back to summoning animals and blowing them up.
There are some peculiarities that you need to get used to – the biggest challenge of the game was its control scheme, I discovered, where you attack the way you are facing, but control the way you face with the movement, which means that you need to hold on shoot to strafe instead of just strafe – but this could just be me, and Drinkbox’s talent remains. It is fast and fluid, smooth, but light. It is great and a good example of what this studio is about. A layer of adorable nonsense, at ground level, that soon gives way to a much deeper pit of combat and systems, and a quiet mastery of the genre.