Games: The Wonderful End of the World mini-review

The Wonderful End of the World is a casual game from developer Dejobaan Games ("making video games for over 75 years...") I was a big enough sucker to play the demo on Steam, and was hooked enough to buy the game. What is it? In short, it's Katamari Damacy with an attitude. The plot? You're a disembodied sprit that must collect as much of the world as possible before the world ends. The mechanism? Walk into something smaller than you and it sticks to you. As you collect stuff, you get bigger and can collect larger items. Sound familiar? There's not a lot of gameplay here that hasn't already been done in the Katamari universe.

tWEotW does bring a lot of attitude and style to the table, though. The levels are far less repetitive than Katamari Damacy, with levels themed after classic video games, an Internet cafe, a wacky mall, etc. There are also several running jokes-- organgutans show up in the oddest places, and if you look around you'll see some bizarre stuff in the levels. There is a minor difference over the Katamari games in that you're graded primarily on the number of items you collect rather than the ultimate size you attain. The two are linked, but the distinction is important to understand. You're graded after each level.

There are 12 levels in all, and 11 of them are easy to unlock. The final level is only unlocked if you get an A or A+ on every single level.

There were a few problems-- the game is fixed resolution with limited setup options. Unlike most Katamari Damacy levels where the game decides what to render based on the scale of your character, tWEotW has an inefficient rendering engine that renders everything all the time. On my anemic system, I had severe slowdowns in the larger scale levels. There are plenty of cases where your character can get stuck between objects-- it's not always clear where the edges of your character get calcullated. The game will eventually move you until you're unstuck, but the time lost is a pain. There's also one minor bug in the final level where you can pass through walls in certain areas.

Conclusions the level design is fairly well polished and wonderfully quirky. The game on the whole is pretty easy--expect to "win" in 2-5 hours with some replay value. I passed every level with at least a B on the first try. But some levels were hard to raise from a B or A- to an A in order to unlock the last level. The developer sells this game for $20, but Steam has it for $10. Is it a fun diversion at $10? Yeah, probably worth it, but I'm not sure if it's worth it at $20.

6/10