Wrongworld – Preview
Wrongworld is a survival game with a unique art-style, quirky characters and lots of hilariously bizarre encounters, currently in Early Access on Steam. Play as a cute alien creature, crashed on a strange planet, struggling to survive and eventually head back home again. The game has been developed and published by Sludj Games.
The whole introduction of the character and the situation he is in, is summarized in one rather funny schematic picture detailing what happened, as the game is loading for the first time and generating a new world. You are an alien creature who fell at the island where you find yourself when the game starts, after your space ship blew up. Your main objective is first to survive by gathering food and avoiding as much physical damage as possible, and later, as you gain more and more crafting recipes by building more tools, to build a rocket to get back into space. In order to be able to collect all essential items you need to finish the game, you need to kill several bosses hiding out in the world.
There are also some weird challenges you’ll encounter during your gameplay, like big monsters appearing, a mysterious pyramid building spawning snakes, evil pigs, or strange rituals draining life from your plants and trees. These events aren’t explained, but you’ll figure out how to deal with them by trying several things. These events are great to experience, they add a lot of fun and character to this game.
The graphics are simple but pretty awesome and fit the cartoonish atmosphere of the game. This is a 3D world, with simple models and textures. The characters look super cute, a bit like muppets. The world is low poly, but it looks fantastic, very colorful and cheerful, and there’s a clear difference between the several biomes types. The skybox looks unique: either a sky full of green nebulas, or a painted sky full of clouds, with a cool looking sun and moon moving through the sky. The transition between day and night is super sudden, with the sky just moving into a day or night sky. The night is significantly darker than the day.
The animations are pretty cool, they are smooth and often funny. If you don’t have a tool for chopping trees or mining rock, you’ll smash the trees and rocks with your face to gather them. Fighting looks cool as well, with several attack animations. If you attack or get hit, you’ll see hearts appearing when you’ve done (or gotten) damage, and a comic style BAM or POW text appearing.
The UI is pretty simple, the screen looks clean with just your health & hunger bars and the time of day and days you survived displayed. Besides that you can toggle your inventory, equipment and crafting screens, which are windows displayed as an overlay on your normal screen so you can select food or potions to eat without looking away from your character. The descriptions of the items are often pretty hilarious, its worth to read them all!
There’s looping soft ambient music during gameplay, which is pretty calm and unobtrusive. Sometimes the music changes to fit new situations. The sounds of the creatures in the game are super cute and often funny. As you craft or cook, you’ll hear a general crafting sound of sawing, drilling and hammering. It’s rather silly to hear saws when you cook food, but it’s funny as well.
Wrong world is a survival game. Your first objective is to stay alive, while exploring a world searching for food and materials to craft with. There are two bars you need to keep an eye on: health and hunger. Health is going to be the biggest issue for the most part of the game, especially in the first 20 or so days: food is relatively easy to get, but eating only restores a tiny bit of health. If you have gotten far enough into the game to craft an alchemy table and have a fair supply of ingredients, you’ll be able to craft health potions and worry less about your health as you play.
At the start of the game you need to spend a lot of time collecting resources while trying to stay alive. Staying alive is tricky: you need to keep your belly filled, but mostly you need to fight well and know when to run away from fights to avoid getting too much damage. Expect to fight a lot. Sometimes monsters spawn when gathering resources: snakes can appear when digging, rock-monsters appear when mining, and tree-monsters appear when chopping trees. At night there are slime creatures roaming the world which have a ranged attack and will hunt you, but if you stay close to a campfire they will disappear. Most creatures in the world are aggressive, except for pigs which can be a good source of meat and leather. Fighting is a bit tricky: it’s easy to miss an enemy, making your character dash past it and need to turn back, giving the enemy an opportunity to hit back. Locking on to enemies has been improved since the last patch, but it’s still rather tricky.
You can grow vegetables, flowers and trees at any location of your choosing. You can even plant meat and leather just like trees to multiply the resources, so fighting random world creatures is not strictly needed to gather resources, although its hard to avoid fighting when you gather. You can speed up the process of growing vegetables and flowers by building a greenhouse. Tools like shovels, axes and pickaxes do break after a while, but it’s pretty hard to say when they break, it seems rather random.
As you explore you’ll quickly notice that your inventory is quite small, and you won’t be able to carry everything you’ll find. That’s one reason to get back to one location often, where you initially can dump extra items on the floor where they’ll stay, and eventually build chests to store your items. At this location you’ll first build a campfire to protect you from the slugs at night, and eventually you’ll build more and more advanced crafting stations. As you build new types of crafting stations, you get access to more efficient food, and more technologically advanced recipes. These recipes will help you survive and get around the world faster, which is really handy to gather supplies and avoid enemies.
The days pass very quickly, so you have little time to explore before it gets night and the slimey slugs come out to hunt you. However, later in the game you’ll get a lot of options to get around faster to explore, like shooting yourself around using cannons, building a jet-pack, crafting speed potions, or crafting speedy sneakers which you can unlock by gaining enough experience after death. You’ll need to return to your base often to dump your gathered items in your chests, and since building crafting stations need a lot of resources, you’ll probably only keep one home base with all the items you need. Eventually you’ll upgrade the crafting stations to get all the recipes you’ll need to finish the game, and then you’ll need to face the final bosses of the game to gather the last essential ingredients.
This game has permadeath, so when you die, you’ll have to start over. However, you’ll get a certain amount of experience based on your progress in the game, and gaining experience levels will grant you recipes which will make a second playthrough easier, like boxing gloves to help you fight and sneaker to help you move around faster.
Conclusion
Wrongworld is an excellent game! It’s a great survival game with an objective you can work towards, and along your journey you’ll encounter lots of bizarre events and creatures. The game is full of amazing silliness, with its cutesy weird, muppet-like characters and enemies, funny sounds, great animations, hilarious tooltips, and silly achievements. The game features permadeath, but even if you die you’ll get rewards for the progress you made during your previous playthrough. While the game may be unforgiving in that aspect, it’s not too difficult to achieve the goals to finish the game. This game is recommended for anyone liking the survival genre, or willing to try out a survival game for the first time.
Wrongworld - Preview,
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