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.

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.

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.

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.