The Next World

Nice simple gameplay parts to the game. it's a bit a slow at some point but it's fun!

one of the best games on steam

story :5/5 graphics 4/5 sound : 4/5 A nice little text based adventure isk game, would recommend but not for full price

not a bad game but for some reason while i finished the game i havent gotten a single achievement

I do not recommend "The Next World" at all. It suffers from three huge flaws: 1) Trope-iness, 2) Tastelessness, 3) Brokenness. Spoiler-free summary: 1) The story is predictable, the conflict is forced, and the premise is compromised by blowing the stakes so out of proportion the figurative human element is lost. 2) The human element is also literally lost - lives are used as a kind of game currency. 3) Whatever math is supposed to be running in the background to track the numbers stopped functioning in the second to last chapter and never recovered. I will elaborate these below, but there are SPOILERS AHEAD, so stop here if that would upset you. Trope-iness The villain doesn't bluff? Neither do I. I knew the choice would cause a catastrophic game over and I welcomed it. When it happened, I smiled. I did not view it as a failure nor tragedy. Instead, it confirmed everything I'd been thinking about how dreadfully predictable and inane the writing was. Of course the arch villain would have to have his "I'm invincible so I will explain what's really going on" moment with your clueless protagonist. I mean ... you literally are told to "choose your protagonist" just after the confusing intro (I had no idea who the "you" was for the first 10 minutes), which implied there would have to be a big (implausibly evil) antagonist. If the author is not allowed to deliver the exposition via his villain, the story would just have to end, wouldn't it? That the encounter with the villain would occur at all was preposterous. It was cringe inducing. Tastelessness The survival of 1000 people just wasn't enough to hang a story on, eh? Nope, their lives are literally used as currency to advance the plot, which has to take on cartoonishly monstrous proportions lest the reader not realize just how important the author's vision was, right? Humanity has to be painted as being forever consigned to two camps: hapless good guys flailing about in their naive ignorance, and a big baddie with a god-complex served by the faceless forces of evil who are the source of all suffering and misfortune. It is in poor taste to see human lives counted down as a ticker next to counters for supplies and resources. It is disgusting to see lives literally used as a game play mechanic to purchase plot events. It may not be framed as that, but think about it, that's what this game does. Brokenness Eventually, the resource gathering numbers stopped adding up and changing rations had no effect on mood or health. It was late enough in the plot, I hadn't made any saves along the way, and it wasn't stopping the story, so I just ignored the survival element at that point. What a waste. I liked the background art, though.

I have played hoping bugs what people mentioned are fixed. Unfortunatly no. Nice story, but how games change after some of your choices are often silly. I stop playing when I stuck after one of my decisions about reactor, when I could not build anything because I didn't have anough energy. Sad thing is, I have habitatt in reserve I switched off some other modules and in theory I should build that thing, but I couldn't. Sad. It was a moment when story starts unveil in interesting way.

[h1]Be [i]very[/i] careful about spoilers if you're going through the user reviews to see if this game is worth picking up.[/h1] The Next World is short and laser focused on it's story. Getting spoiled on any plot events in this game will have a drastic impact on your enjoyment of it. As such, this review is going to be as spoiler free as possible. ****************************************************************************************************************************************************************** I had no idea what to expect from this game beyond it's description on the store page. The premise sounded interesting, if not terribly original, so on a whim I decided to pick it up in the sale. I ended up being pleasantly surprised by it, though there are a few caveats I definitely want to address after I describe what I like about it. [b]The Good[/b] The story is good overall. There's a major twist that happens pretty early on which is executed competently and effectively. It genuinely took me by surprise and got me hooked. When it happens the colony's entire situation suddenly takes on much more meaning. It raises the stakes in a very interesting way, and it's safe to say I was enjoying the game by that point. The next couple of twists don't have the same massive implications as the first one, but they successfully surprised me in a satisfying way each time. I know that the idea of subverting audience expectations has pretty much become a meme at this point, but I think this game's story is an example of it being done right. It's definitely not perfect, though, which I'll get to. The characters are all decent. You learn just enough about all of them that their interactions with each other have some emotional weight. I liked most of them, and even the ones I didn't like still had one or two things about them that at least made them interesting. I wanted more from them, I wanted to get more involved with them and learn more about them. It's both a good thing and a bad thing. This is closely related to the story issues which, again, I'll get to. Finally, the resource management stuff is fun. There just needs to be more of it. [b]The Meh[/b] The only way for me to describe my main problem with the story is to compare it to the 2015 Sci-fi novel [i]Seveneves[/i]. I'm just going to go ahead and spoil the ending of it a little because it's fine. Gamers don't read books. To oversimplify it, seven women are the only survivors of the destroyed moon's fragments raining down on the surface of Earth. At first you think it's just going to end like that, humanity couldn't keep it's ♥♥♥♥ together long enough to survive the moonpocolypse, but then one of the characters pulls out a GIGANTIC asspull that's going to save the human race. It's such a gigantic asspull that you should feel annoyed by it, but because you've been with these seven characters for so long you just end up buying it. You get caught up in the interpersonal drama that goes on between them after the announcement of the asspull instead of focusing on how ludicrous the asspull is. There's actually quite a few similarities between Seveneves and The Next World, but that one is the similarity that really stuck out to me the most. The asspull at the end of Seveneves ends up working because of what's going on with the characters. What happens in The Next World is not an asspull, but the reasoning behind why everything is happening ends up being pretty silly. Because you never really get invested with the characters, there's nothing to counteract the sillyness. It ends up subtracting from how heavy and important the subject matter of the story is. I really wanted more character stuff is what it all comes down to, I think. I don't want it to sound like it's a deal breaker. It's not. Like I said, the story is good overall. If this was highschool, and I was a teacher grading this student's paper, I'd give it a B+. If nothing else it's a coherent story, which is something many of the most famous and treasured video game writers aren't capable of. In conclusion, I think the 70% user review score for this game is very unfair. I want all of you to know that I'll be telling my dad, who works for Valve, to ban all of the people who left a negative review of this game for disagreeing with me. In all seriousness I was very satisfied with my 5$ purchase. I'm looking forward to playing this game again on the hardest difficulty.

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