World of One is a horror-themed puzzle-platformer by developer Grimwood Team. At the game’s beginning, the player uses a lighthouse to travel from one foggy world to the next. As the player progresses, things continue to grow bleaker. From world to world, the sky grows darker, the sound of crows gets louder, monsters start to roam the lands in increasing frequency. I even found one puzzle which involved—what I hope were—scarecrows hung by nooses.World of One is a horror-themed puzzle-platformer.
As for the game itself, the player doesn’t acquire an actual weapon until after the defeat of the first boss in the game.The puzzles are—for the most part—easy enough to figure out if you are patient enough, although there were at least two instances where I encountered a puzzle difficult enough to make me consult a video walk-though from the developers. The first instance did contain a hint that I had overlooked either due to being impatient or due to poor level design. The second instance however, required me to guess a random 3-digit number. After my first few guesses, I decided to consult the video walkthrough to get the solution. After seeing what the answer was, I tried viewing the last few levels up until that point and found nothing that indicated what the answer to this puzzle was. This might have been fine were it not for the fact that I needed to know this number to get a key that would let me get further in the level. I will leave a description of both puzzles, as well as their solutions, at the bottom of this review.
After acquiring a weapon, the levels start to introduce enemies. One thing I found annoying was that the player-character would die in one hit. Now, this wouldn’t be a huge problem if the player-character had good dodging abilities, all the enemies were slow, or the game would make sure not to have too many enemies out at once. Unfortunately, there are plenty of fast moving enemies and some instances where the game overwhelms you with enemies. This became particularly annoying during the second boss fight, where, near the fight’s end, the player has to watch out for the boss and a small squad of enemies. Since you die in one hit—and are forced to restart the fight from the beginning if you die—it took me multiple hours to get past this. As for dodging, there was a ‘dodge’ button, but I would forget to use it half the time. This might have been due to me using a keypad as opposed to a controller though (the game recommends using a controller every time you load).
Eventually, I reached a point where I wasn’t able to continue. The walkthrough showed a switch that, when pulled, would open the way forward. I found this switch and pulled it, only for nothing to happen. I continued pressing and pulling this switch, but alas, nothing happened. I tried reloading the level and repeated things in the exact same order as the video, thinking the glitch was caused either by me doing some action prematurely or forgetting to do something, but I was met with the same result. As such, I can’t review the game past that point.
And now, as promised, the solutions to the two troublesome puzzles. By the way, in case it wasn’t obvious, SPOILER ALERT.
The first troublesome puzzle was the hanging scarecrow puzzle. The bodies each had a number of white dots on them, from one dot to four dots, and were next to a set of four switches. It was easy enough to figure out that the row of scarecrows related to the row of switches. For example, the 3rd scarecrow had one dot on it. Activating the 3rd switch would cause this scarecrow to lower. I activated the switches so that the scarecrows would fall down in order of their dots, from one to four. This rewarded me with a key to a nearby chest. The problem was that this chest was suspended in the air and I wasn’t able to use items while jumping. Since this was the first level where you had a weapon—and all puzzles up to that point required you to use the weapon in some way—my first thought was that I could knock the chest down. However, the weapon did nothing, thus making it look like I was swinging at empty air. From the video walkthrough, I saw that I needed to turn off the outer two switches to get the chest to lower. Then on further examination of the level, I found a sign that had the numbers of the middle two switches and a down arrow. The reason I had ignored this before was because the sign was right next to another puzzle I had solved to get to the scarecrow puzzle—a gate with a switch that required me to use a combo with the weapon to open the gate. Since the sign was next to the gate, I had assumed the sign was giving me a hint to which combo I needed to use.
The second troublesome puzzle required me to guess a random number. After watching the walkthrough, I learned that the number was 315. I then tried looking around the level up until that point to see if there was some sort of hint that implied the number was 315 (I was able to guess any number between 0 and 999). Either I overlooked something, or there was no hint in the level.
(Were I to give it a score, I would give it 7/10 if that glitch I mentioned was only limited to my copy of the game and the random number puzzles does have a hint in the game. If all versions of the game have that glitch (or the game does not include any hint for the random number puzzle), then I would give it a 6/10)
Here is the World of One Action Trailer:
World of One is now available for PC on Steam.
PC Review
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Overall Score - 7/107/10
I am a recent Computer Science/Game Development Programming Chapman University Graduate. I am a life long enthusiast of computer/video gaming and my favorite game genres are adventure, choice-driven stories, fighting, and racing. My favorite game/movie series include but aren't limited to 'Legend of Zelda'; 'Dragon Age'; 'Persona'; 'Sonic the Hedgehog'; 'Mario'; 'Metroid' ;'Megaman'; 'Naruto'; 'Batman'; 'Spiderman'; 'Star Wars'; and 'Star Trek.'
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