Nobody Saves the World (2022)

• Playtime: 24,5 hours (completed + done most quests, level 74)

• Played 2026

• Context: Basegame only. I had no idea what this was, just wanted the cards.

The Good

• Fun combat.
• Lots of forms (they're basically classes) to switch between.
• A ton of different skills/attacks, this is the strongest part of the game.
• Decent story and dialogues.
• Some amusing, silly quests (getting hatched as an egg, slug necromancy).
• Really feels like its own thing.
• Nice art style.

The Bad

• The difficulty is about 5-10% too hard for my taste and definitely too hard for a decent chunk of players and there are no difficulty options.
• No healing potion or other "emergency button" either.
• Half of the forms quickly become irrelevant, in part because of their vulnerability.
• Switching forms is clunky. The menu is clumsy, the popup menu doesn't pause and you can't pin forms so they switch around.
• You get three passive slots but you'll always want "auto pickup money" and "lifedrain" so effectively you only have one slot.
• A few form quests are obnoxious and there are far too many of them - it took a few hours of grinding to complete them all.
• Needed a few more teleporters, especially near a couple of dungeons.
• The item grind is a bit much, notably only being able to buy 5 upgrade tokens at a time.
• One form is locked behind progress in a timed dungeon. No thanks.
• The forced zoom in some places is unnecessarily annoying.

The Ugly

• No mouse controls at all.
• A couple of quests are truly awful, especially the "protect the object that dies to 1 hit" quest.
• If you fail a quest you have to sit through all the dialogue and animations again. And again. And again.

Conclusion

Nobody Saves The World was a really nice surprise. Based on the art i expected a platformer, but it's a really fun action game in which you bounce around as a turtle, spook people as a ghost and crush enemies with dumbbells as a bodybuilder. The balance is a tiny bit off, the keyboard-only controls are a pain and a couple of optional quests made me ragequit but other than that i really enjoyed my time with this.

To get the good stuff out of the way: the world and story are cute if fairly simple, the combat is fun, and it's cool to mess around with mixing and matching different abilities on different characters; it's a multiclasser's dream.

So, it's fun—until you have to pause to switch out your abilities. Or pause to switch to a new character (who you realize you haven't used in a while and now you need completely redo that build). Or pause to complete a quest. By the time you get to the end of the game are tackling more complex dungeons and have 10 infinite quests that you need to make sure you complete as soon as possible because they won't keep progressing if you do, it feels like you're spending more time in the menu than actually playing the game.

The quest completion is particularly egregious, because that problem was solved decades ago. Just give me the XP when the requirements are met, don't make me pause the game to complete it, especially not when I'm completing quests all the damn time.

For that matter, having to switch builds frequently is also a solved problem: just let me save builds. This would be especially helpful for going between dungeons and exploration; the horseshoe is basically useless in combat, but great for travel.

It just really dragged the game down for me, and exacerbated any other aspect I found frustrating.

At first glance I didn't expect much from Nobody Saves the World, but SkillUp's review and praise for the game opened my eyes to it, and I decided to play it in 2023 when I had time. I have now beaten it, and upgraded every character and almost every ability, and I can say, my 28 hours with the game was a good time. It can definitely be completed in less time, probably half, if you're not aiming to explore every nook and cranny and upgrading the characters to max rank.

Speaking of, the levelling system in this game is quite clever and intuitive. You don't gain experience points by killing enemies, you level up your characters (called forms, because you can transform into any unlocked form at any time) by completing character-specific challenges, which will force you to experiment with equipping abilities from the other forms, to create sort of unique classes. It's a fun system, and I'm sure my description of it here was kinda bad, as it's late and I basically just finished the game, but it's a fun system that deserves praise.

The overall presentation of the game is kinda bland to me - the art style of the game is reminiscent of 2000 Flash animations, which has its charm, but ultimately it doesn't really excite or wow you, and same goes for the music and sound design: it's fine, but nothing more.

Overall, the game is a fun, streamlined take on the Action RPG formula known from games like Diablo, that I recommend you play if you're into the genre :) Plus, it' really cheap at ~20€, with a 40% sale right now on gog.com.

I am not quite getting this game. It just feels incredibly grindy without interesting mechanics or elements to it. I love the art style and the humor but early on the forms are too limited and don’t seem to play that different. I contrast that with a game like Children of Morta wherein each of the family’s combat mechanics was different enough to keep it fresh through the runs. I also agree with others that have said the mini-quests feel like a chore list and don’t make it more engaging.

It leaves GamePass soon so I am glad I tried it out.

3 and a half months later, I finally finished this game.

It's a grind. Breaks from the grind were an absolute requirement if I was to enjoy my playtime. The story was cute. I'm not typically one to absorb much story in a game. Cutscenes trigger ADHD, and unless the writing is on point, it just doesn't sink in.

This story, coupled with the need to press A for each line of npc speech text (annoying but sparse enough to not detract from the game), actually registered for me as something more than meaningless banter. It was an adventure tale, with clues and revelations. It was silly and never took itself too seriously. The illustrations complemented the story and dialog nicely.

I appreciated the loadout system, creating combinations of attacks from different unlocked forms. I like the passives. Building combinations of abilities to counter a specific dungeon/castle is satisfying. I wish there were an option to save a loadout/build. At any time, a loadout built around form-progression quests will be vastly different from what is needed for the next dungeon.

The map and exploration dynamic felt like a love letter to the 90s game boy games, with some paths blocked by campaign milestones, others by side quests, and always many different options. The multifloor map display and navigation is excellent.

All in all, the game is very well crafted. It is clear that much thought went into all parts of the game, influencing and gently nudging players towards sets of objectives without ever forcing a direction or sequence of actions. Nothing has to be done in order and for me, nothing broke along the way. I ran into a bug once. Just once. I had to redo a dungeon from start to boss because the game didn't process an unlock the right way. Not a huge deal, especially when compared to the number of bugs that make it into production in most modern games.

Lots of save points, easy to pick up and play for 15 minute increments, or for a couple hours. I wouldn't want to play more than that at a time. Overall a nice light-hearted indie game.

Anyone thinking about picking up a Razer Kishi, reconsider. Compared to the Backbone One, it’s very poorly designed. Squishy buttons, poor grip on the phone, cheap materials, and no passthrough audio. Somehow I missed that last fact when reading reviews. If Backbone One is an A+ phone controller, the Razer Kishi is a D+, maybe C- at best.

Update: what an asinine move by Razer, omitting the passthrough audio. Of course all of my headphones use AAC as the audio codec over Bluetooth, and Android doesn’t support AAC, so there is immense audio lag when I play anything via Bluetooth audio. All the Kishi needs is a simple 3.5mm audio connection but nope, not on this thing. So this thing is ultimately pointless unless I want to invest in new Bluetooth headphones, which I don’t.

And I’m an ass for not looking thoroughly through reviews to find out that there was no pass through audio. But why wouldn’t there be? Why would you leave out something this basic and fundamental to portable gameplay? I hate returning products, especially because I didn’t do my due diligence and research it thoroughly. But this thing is useless. What a complete dingus move Razer.

Oh and again, this is Apple’s fault for not supporting game streaming apps in the first place.

There are few games that have the power to absolutely "consume" me until I hit the credits. Those that made me load Steam and grab the controllers even if I only have five minutes to play. Nobody Saves the World is one of those games. I knew that every second of gameplay made me closer to a goal: unlocking a new form that could change the way to play or a new ability that would make my previous forms more powerful.

And the best thing of all, working towards those goals is really fun.

You can read my review in spanish in GamerFocus.

I know that there are a few of you that couldn't enjoy this game the way I do (Hi, @BMO). I get it. The combat is not that deep and that could be a bummer. But I'm one of those that enjoy creating and experimenting with builds. I can find fun not neccesarily in pressing the button, but in mixing skill so that those presses feel more satisfying.

Also, this game is really funny and the map is great to explore. The side quests are really varied and the art is great. What's not to love? He he he.

iOS desperately needs a dedicated Game Pass app. The input lag via the browser app is horrendous. Under the same network conditions on a laptop with an Xbox controller there is really no discernible lag. Yet when played through the browser app, the lag is very pronounced with reaction to button presses severely delayed. And it’s not a controller issue because the lag is the same when using the touchscreen controls built into the web app.

I already have a Backbone One for my phone. I don’t want to have to buy a Razer Kishi for an Android phone just so I can play Game Pass using a dedicated app. Come on Apple, stop being jerks!

I found a review that hits on the problems I have this this game. Here are some relevant excerpts:

An action role-player vaguely in the style of Diablo, the central appeal of Nobody Saves The World is to unlock all the different forms and so long as there’s always another one to look forwards to it remains compelling. The further you get though, the more you start to realise that the underlying gameplay and structure is just a means to an end and there’s far too much anticipation and not enough payoff.

Each form has its own signature attack and passive ability, but they can also be mixed and matched with abilities from the other forms to create a character that’s able to perform all manner of different status attacks and special moves. It’s a great system, that’s cleverly thought out and very flexible, but it does have one important flaw: the combat it enables is extremely dull and repetitive.

Despite all the excellent work with the abilities and different characters the combat doesn’t involve anything more complicated than keeping your finger down on the attack button. Crowd control is important but beyond making sure you don’t get cornered, and dodging the occasional projectile, there really isn’t much tactics necessary at all; not given the very limited artificial intelligence of the enemies. This is underlined by the horribly dull boss battles, which are always anticlimactic and are usually just a slightly bigger version of a monster you’ve fought a dozen times before.

Nobody Saves The World has a number of interesting elements but in the end they’re largely wasted on a repetitive and frequently boring experience. The degree to which it manages to hide this, by repeatedly convincing you that the next unlock is worth slogging on for, is impressive but it’s really just hiding the fact that the gameplay is every bit as hollow as the main character.

I feel as though gamers have been so thoroughly trained to chase achievements that Nobody Saves the World is hitting bigger than it warrants. I do wonder once every form is unlocked and every achievement won whether the majority will stick around to see the game through. Somehow I suspect a good number who got hooked on the game’s cycle will quit before the end once that dopamine supply is exhausted.

I don't know that I'm going to make it through this one. I really enjoy shapeshifting in games -- I always loved playing a Druid in Diablo, for example. I don't mind that the combat is simple, it's just that there are some frustrating factors that frequently cause it to get into the "not fun" territory.

The visual and audio clarity is awful. Why are my ability cool downs hidden in the bottom right corner of the screen? Why isn't the health bar bigger? Why isn't there a stronger sound effect when I'm taking damage? The game really likes to swarm you with enemies, making it easy to lose your character. Instead of using some sort of indicator with transparency to show where you are, you get a large, completely opaque indicator that covers up enemies.

For a game based around shapeshfting, the interface to do so is horrible too. If you want to pause to do it, you have to go through a couple of menu pages and then navigate a tree to get to the form you want. If you want to do it on the fly, you get a fiddly menu that maps 8 directions on the joysticks to forms. That's frustrating enough, but there are more than 8 forms in the game. As far as I can find, you can't select which 8 you want on there. It just seems to be the most recent 8, with the positions filling in for the one that just fell out. Meaning, you can't just remember a certain form is in a certain spot. Just map triggers + face buttons to specific forms like a sane developer.

For all of those complaints, though, I really enjoy a lot about the game. Mixing passives and abilities from different forms together is fun. Being a horse and kicking enemies around or sliding around as a slug is just inherently fun for me. It'll probably have to go on the "play in short bursts when I feel like taking a break from a better game" list.

Nobody Saves the World doesn't make a great first impression. Combat is not particularly fun and I deeply dislike the fact that you have to enter a menu to redeem quests in order to level up. I have absolutely no clue why you don't just automatically level up after completing quests. And the quest mechanic feels like an achievement system, a game that has been gamified. If your game is fun, I'll play it. I'm not going to play it because you turned the entire affair into achievement hunting.

And while I usually enjoy Drink Box's 2D art, I'm not loving it in this game. It feels strongly like a game that would have been better served by a pixel art aesthetic.

I want to give this a fair shake so I might keep playing it but so far I don't know if this scratches any itch I have in respect to dungeon crawlers.

The changeling mechanic is fairly inovative, but the combat... It's hard to hit where you want furthermore enemies are so simple, they have one attack, even the bosses. The game just throws a insane amount of then in you. This makes the game feels a little monotonous and removes any sensation of increasing your mechanical abilities, just feel a little injusticed about dying because more than 50 enemies are attacking you.

Beside that the game have some nice NPC interactions, and the map is very beautiful and well worked. Not a game to finish, but, kinda good. Deserves a try.