Worldless is a metroidvania by Noname studio set at the beginning of time, as two factions, light and dark, red and blue, circle and diamond fight and kill each other for an unknown reason. You just fight. That’s not me being flippant, either. The game implies that neither side quite understands why they fight. You begin your journey as one of the footsoliders of the Blue fighting your opposite on the Red when a sudden cataclysm strikes and you fall and lose your opponent. Thus begins your search to find them. Along the way you will fight other enemies, gain new abilities, and track down and play as your opposite number and become something new entirely.
Worldless is best described as an abstract puzzle platformer with the occasional bout of turn-based active-time combat that you must surmount before you can progress. You begin the game with the ability to jump and to interact with game elements. Game elements include motes of light you can turn into platforms, motes that open doors, husks of fallen beings that you can collect to add to your health, and sometimes the remains of red and blue creatures, which can either grant you a new movement power, or orbs and diamonds to purchase battle skills with.
The world of Worldless is abstract and alien, with the landscape filled with geometric shapes, and defined by a signature color, be it blue, red, green, yellow, etc. Each area might also introduce other elements, like see-saws, boost pads, or water to help or hinder your progress. The first movement upgrade you get is a dash, which you can use on the ground or in air, and to launch yourself horizontally or vertically. Using this dash to reach high platforms and make long jumps is a common experience in the early platforming sections, but there’s enough variance in the terrain and the elements you can interact with that Worldless doesn’t get old, especially as it sneakily teaches you new tricks and techniques you can perform with the dash, like using it to dash into a wall, jump off, and dash into a nearby wall to platform higher.
Another wrinkle the game throws your way is the fact that your character disperses upon being doused in water, but you can dash through water safely. I mentioned this was a puzzle platformer, and a lot of those puzzles involve figuring out how to traverse from one area to another, or to create a path towards your goal. In this, Worldless excels. Worldless provides a number of puzzles requiring you to measure your jumps and dashes to safely cross through waterfalls and avoid falling into large bodies of water. Even later, after you get other movement upgrades like a hyperdash and the classic double jump, dashing remains a key movement technique. Traversing the gorgeous vistas and using your various powers to perform a tricky platforming section or solve a puzzle to unlock a new area or a shortcut between areas just feels excellent. You actually feel like your character gets stronger and more capable as you unlock skills. Same with how Worldless‘s few NPCs react to you.
Worldless is very light on exposition and dialogue. In fact, the dialogue is more a monologue from a creature made entirely of lines and rectangles as it muses on your growth, your unique nature, and the meaning behind it all. It’s creepy and foreboding and very atmospheric, especially when it has an existential crisis at being ignored. This is another amazing bit of using simple gameplay elements to convey story and also power.
Combat in Worldless is few and far between, only at specific locations in the map, and each one prevents you from moving onwards. Every single combat is structured with your player on the left, and the enemy on the right. Except in very specific circumstances where you initiate a combat, then the enemy gets its chance to kill you and you try your best to time your blocks to deflect its magic or melee attacks – each type has a different visual indicator and must be blocked or later dodged with the correct move. This pattern repeats until you either lose all your HP and get thrown back to the left – all your combats are approached from the left – to run off or try again, you defeat the enemy and can move on or you’ve defeated it by absorption and stolen its core to power yourself up. It’s this last part that’s really the problem. Every enemy has an absorption gauge, and you need to fill this gauge to a certain point to be able to attempt to steal a foe’s core. But the process of absorbing an enemy doesn’t stop at filling the gauge. After filling the gauge and inputting the absorb command – L1 and R1 at the same time, hope you still have enough time left in the turn because the gauge goes down after every turn too – you have to input a button command, and the sequence you have to press is hidden from you. Guess wrong too many times and you go back to the battle with the absorption gauge greatly emptied. This and the fact that it’s entirely possible to wander into areas you are nowhere near capable of defeating no matter how well you execute your combat (and there is no signposting of this apart from being instantly obliterated) is one of the most frustrating things about Worldless. Made worse because sometimes there are just plain difficult fights that it is possible to defeat through sheer execution. The combat unfortunately becomes very trial and error as the game goes on and it becomes extremely frustrating, even with the lack of penalties for failure. I’m not sure how to fix combat- aside from changing absorption – but I do feel that a number of battles are very overtuned and feel like you have to understand their gimmick immediately to hold on long enough to even get the chance to absorb a core.
I experienced only one bug while I was playing Worldless, though it was a particularly serious one, requiring a reset to fix. After defeating an enemy and immediately moving, I somehow became untethered from gameplay, and could move my character anywhere around the map but interact with nothing. I also discovered a developer command while trying to fix the glitch. I was not able to reproduce the glitch, and none of my progress had been lost.
Worldless offers a gorgeous world, solid platforming and puzzles and an interesting premise, but it’s tied to a combat system that doesn’t feel fully realized. If you’re prepared for that, Worldless might be worth your time.
Tim reviewed Worldless on PC with a review key.
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