I’ll be frank. I did not like Worldless. As a big fan of Metroidvanias and puzzle platformers, I had high hopes for this game. Worldless was my least favorite Metroidvania I’ve played recently. Though there were some good elements to Worldless, I was mostly left feeling disappointed.
Worldless is a Metroidvania featuring a blue and white star entity. This main character is locked into conflict with a red and black star entity. Throughout the game, it is hammered home that this conflict is hardly unique to you. The conflict between the red and blue stars is waged viciously throughout the map. In Worldless, you’ll platform and fight your way across a unique map, searching for a third green entity, facing off against your counterpart, and gaining new abilities and weapons.
While Worldless has a compelling concept that drew me in, I was sorely disappointed. Despite the number of weapons and abilities, the combat felt cripplingly shackled to countering and dodging.
When I started playing this game, I was excited. Even though combat wasn’t my favorite, I was having a good time. However, the game’s ending dashed my hopes, left a bad taste in my mouth, and I was thoroughly uninterested in touching the game again. The ending also left me disheartened and feeling like I had wasted my time.
I really wanted to like Worldess, and to some extent, I did. However, this game left me with bruised thumbs and a heavy heart. I just can’t recommend it.
Soaring Spirits
Despite my current disappointment, Worldless has some genuinely interesting elements that make it stand out. I started Worldless excited and in high spirits.
Worldless is a game that doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to mechanics. There are things you have to figure out for yourself, and that’s part of the fun! One of the biggest examples is figuring out how the map works. After a while, you will begin to get the hang of it, making exploring the world more fun. Charting a course through your map becomes its own interesting game as you gain skills that unlock new traversal options. You’ll unlock dashing, wall-jumps, double jumps, and even a super sprint that lets you run on water!
I also found the platforming to be truly exciting. There are multiple abilities to juggle, and they are all snappy, fun, stylish, and cool. The platforming and traversal only expand halfway through the game, when you encounter your counterpart.
Halfway through Worldless, you’ll finally confront your counterpart in a beautiful sequence that has the two stars join up. This is a special moment and left me hopeful for the rest of the game. After this, you can switch between the two at will, opening up new and fascinating choices for platforming and combat. This had me backtracking to areas, as the second protagonist’s abilities open up different areas of the map.
The duality and interplay between Edda (the blue-white star) and Aven (the red-black star) becomes the star of the show. It’s impressive what Worldless is able to do without either main character exchanging words. It’s a shame that other aspects of this game let me down so much.
Sore Thumbs
Cards on the table: I started out biased against the combat in Worldless. Worldless’s combat heavily focuses on perfect blocks and dodges. This gameplay loop is simply not my favorite. If you don’t block and parry perfectly, you’ll lose quickly. If this style of gameplay is your cup of tea, you’re likely going to have far more fun with the combat than I did.
Combat sections in Worldless are often optional and can commonly take the format of a puzzle. An enemy might unleash a very specific set of moves that you have to counter perfectly or use abilities in the correct order. If you don’t do it properly, you lose.
While combat puzzles can be interesting, I found these incredibly restrictive. Despite continually acquiring abilities and weapons, Worldless routinely offers encounters that only care about perfect parries. This restrictive quality is one of the biggest downsides of combat in Worldless.
Worldless has few opportunities to engage on your own terms. If you’re not pressing the right buttons exactly when the game wants you to, you’re playing the game wrong. This can be especially frustrating in boss fights and leave them feeling like extended memorization sequences. If you press the wrong button, you’re likely to lose quickly. In some cases, players may need to replay a five-minute fight.
The fight against Unicorn left me with aching thumbs in a way no other game has left me. This should say something coming from an avid enjoyer of Elden Ring. Unicorn is a beautiful enemy, and I really wanted to enjoy this fight. Sadly, the extended sequences of exact button presses left my fingers bruised and my enthusiasm exhausted. An epic fight became a slog.
Not With a Bang, But a Whimper
There’s more at play with the combat in Worldless than just perfect parries, however. While there are a few aspects of combat that I find frustrating, I also oddly felt like the fights did not have any stakes. Many of the combat sections in Worldless are optional, though completing them gives you materials to advance and gain abilities. However, when you lose a fight, you can retry immediately without any downsides.
Because combat is usually optional and you can retry without delay, there’s no consequence for failure other than wasted time. While it is beneficial not to have to navigate back to bosses after facing them, fights lose some importance because of this game mechanic.
This quality of the fights makes them feel less like grand battles and more like chores. This is a shame, because Worldless has absolutely fantastic monster designs. The bosses are all epic. It just sucks that they are not more fun to fight.
Sore Heart
An ending can make or break a game. For me, Worldless’s ending is what put the final nail in its coffin.
Let’s start with the basics: you can’t fight the final boss in Worldless. It literally has an infinite health bar. Honestly, it’s a stretch to even call this a fight or a final boss. It’s a cinematic experience of a hopeless encounter with no winning and little understanding of what happens. The boss “speaks” unintelligibly, exhibits all colors of the rainbow (predominately white), and slowly charges up an unblockable one-hit-kill attack. When the attack hits either Edda or Aven, their counterpart will sacrifice themself, blocking the giant spear and getting skewered by a giant.
The fight concludes with the skewered character slowly dying and the final boss inexorably erasing your map (and all of your progress). Once that is done, your character runs into the boss’s light, is apparently assimilated by their godly power, and then kills and absorbs their counterpart. For me, it was Edda who consumed Aven.
Nothing can be done to prevent this ending. No matter what bosses you defeat, what weapons and abilities you unlock, or even if you encounter the extra secret boss, this ending always happens.
This ending straight up sucks. It left me heartbroken. Worldelss seemed to be telling a story about breaking cycles, cooperating with your enemy, and finding strange new avenues of power. Edda and Aven seemed to be able to find a new way forward other than conflict. That appeared to be the entire plot of the game! However, the final moments of the game contradict all of that.
There Has To Be More, Right? (Nope.)
After watching the dismal ending of Worldless, I rushed to the internet. I was hoping to find a guide on what can be done to prevent what surely must be the “bad ending.” Surely, this game has another ending! A true ending! Right? Wrong.
No other ending exists. This is it. In the end, the same thing will always happen, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. God triumphs. Edda and Aven are unable to stand against God’s might. One was always destined to destroy and consume the other.
This ending felt like a slap in the face. I usually love grim endings… but only if they feel in line with the rest of the game. This ending felt totally out of sync with the tone and message of the game. It was shocking, and not in a good way.
Playing more of the game in preparation for the final boss does not affect your ending whatsoever. Considering that you can confront the final boss relatively early, all that effort to get stronger and better at the game feels pointless. I did a few extra bosses before I decided to face the final boss. I thought if I failed, I could try some more things, unlock new regions of the map, or find Summum, the secret boss. Instead, I got an ending that erased the possibility of playing more of the game and also told me that none of my efforts had mattered. Even if I prepared more, nothing would have changed.
What’s the point of playing a game with so much choice and possibility if it’s all going to get ripped away from you? In my opinion, not much. If you want to play this game for any deeper reason other than combat or platforming, you’re out of luck.
I Won’t Go Back
Worldless was not the worst gaming experience I’ve ever had, but I’m not going back. I went into Worldless with high hopes and the game felt like it had so much promise. In the end, however, the gameplay left my fingers in pain and the ending let me down a lot. There’s more for me to experience in Worldless that I didn’t complete the first time around, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I rate this game a three out of ten. If you’re a fan of perfect parry combat styles, challenging boss fights, and unique exploration mechanics, you might like Worldless more than me. I hope you do.
