Game Review - The World Next Door

Game Review: The World Next Door (PC version) by Rose City Games
Score: +3/-2

A mix of lightning-fast puzzle battles, powerful storytelling, and immersive visual novel elements, The World Next Door follows Jun, a rebellious teen trapped in a parallel realm inhabited by magical creatures, who must find her way home before time runs out.

I got The World Next Door as a freebie from Epic Games. Sometimes free stuff does surprise with their quality, and The World Next Door is really quite decent. It's got an interesting fantasy IP, but it's hard to say if it has enough potential for spinoffs and expansions.

+ The story is intriguing, with a good pace and enough intrigue as you go along to keep you hooked and keep you going. And ultimately the strength and appeal of this game lies in the short story. The story is short enough that if you don't allow yourself to be slowed down by trying to get past the combat portions without the built-in "god mode", it might feel rather short for the regular price tag.

-+ You get token choices to make, but the story is essentially linear and any sense of "choices matter" is really negligible. Sometimes you can make wildly different conversation choices and the characters still react with exactly the same lines. At most there is one side quest that can unlock more information at the very end, so any replayability is to see if you missed any side quests. That said, even token choices are better than none at all, and for some people that can make the difference in their experience of a story.

+ Strong characterization on the cast make each character distinct, memorable, and "come to life".

- The combat is horrible. The concept is intriguing and the gameplay is challenging, but it is too easy to get stuck moving on the board and sometimes it is not clear why your tile swap failed. Fortunately (or because of the clunkiness of combat) there is an "Assist Mode" where you take no damage and it becomes a type of tile matching game so you can still progress through the story no matter how badly you perform in combat.

There is a "versus" mode where you can play as characters in the game and play against friends, but you need another "controller" -- probably a legacy of the Nintendo version. I really didn't bother to look into this as the innovative combat system was not a good enough experience for me to actually want to invite anyone else to try it.