I also found it unsettling how far into the macabre the game went with a child abuse arc, and that wasn’t the only instance of violent trauma as entertainment.īut overall I fell into the rabbit hole of the story, punctuated by atmospheric music, and played late into the night to find out what would happen next. The narrative occasionally veered too far into the pulpy for me-I struggled to relate to a story about a grown art teacher and a teenager falling in love, especially as the game found random ways to ruin her life for not expressing her feelings. ![]() There are lots of little moments that use dramatic irony well, like a story of star-crossed lovers that evolves as you get letters from different characters and see what really happened. Seeing the story from Jimmy’s point of view added levity and depth along with emoticons. I’d already seen in the classmate’s story that she had no idea the paper was there and was terrified she had a dangerous stalker. Now, I just needed to wait for her response … The first night, I didn’t get an email… The second day, all I got was junk mail. Then I bought a drink and quietly left the cup on the counter of the claw machine, with the note under the cup. He writes, “I wrote down my email address on a piece of paper. Take Jimmy, a painfully shy boy whose crush on a classmate veers rapidly into creep territory. The dozen or so characters all have distinct voices. The dictionary does a little to make the characters’ world and stories feel real, but many of the inclusions felt more like the writers trying to show off their homework by including extra details that couldn’t fit into the already-stuffed main game.Įven when WILL’s gameplay falls short, the story’s ridiculous twists and turns keep it otherwise interesting. One is for the completion of in-game objectives like the dictionary, which takes words and phrases from stories and provides background information about random things that come up in the game’s world via letters: assault weapons, stuffed animals, diseases, human trafficking practices, fake anime series. There are a couple reasons to try to get every ending. I often found myself resorting to trial and error. Sometimes, a combination of sentences that you haven’t tried yet yields the same bad ending that you’ve already gotten. These hints aren’t always enough, though, especially as stories and their possibilities get more complex. (The aptly named Lunatic difficulty just gives you walls and walls of text to parse without these hints.) The game provides some hints, especially on Normal difficulty, where certain words appear in red to gesture at what you’re supposed to do. Multiple aspects of a letter can affect a narrative change, and it’s not always clear which piece will lead to which of a story’s numerous possible outcomes. For example, you might move the words “one hour later” to make a character stuck in a Saw-like death trap carefully figure things out instead of flying into a panic and trying random things.Īs stories get more complex, you might find yourself swapping words from two totally unrelated stories, combining pieces of a street-wizened alley cat breaking into a building for water and a socially inept nerd’s run-in with a notorious serial killer. Other characters in the game send you letters asking for help these letters contain certain lines you can swap the order of to change the game’s narrative. You play as an amnesiac girl who, as explained by her dog companion, owns what is essentially a fate-altering pen. ![]() It plays like a telenovela as you move through whiplash-fast tonal shifts: You’re just as soon gut-checked by a battery of melodrama as roving through a jester’s court of toilet jokes and whimsicality. ![]() “Then, start your adventure.” That adventure is packed with so much story that you can’t help playing a little more-even if it doesn’t all work.įrom the moment you turn the game on, WILL: A Wonderful World is full of truly wild shit. “Pick a dark night, make some hot coffee and have some tissues ready,” the next screen said. When shocked or surprised please scream loudly and disturb your neighbours.” The stars could refer to anything-botched assassinations, a dubious student/teacher relationship, the bloody politics of underworld gangs-but that’s the point. Then I saw this, set next to a red megaphone icon: “This game includes occasional **** plots. When I booted up the Switch port of WILL: A Wonderful World, the game told me about its autosave function.
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