Although World’s End Club has been available for iOS devices since last year, it took Too Kyo Games (“Too Crazy Games”) a while to get their new title out on Nintendo Switch. The adventure consists of one Excursion Disguised as a visual novel and mixed with 2D platform elements. Overall, the story is pretty simple, but every now and then it influences the creative Japanese studio that provides us with admirable works such as: Danganronpa o la serie de Zero Escape, shine despite the World End Club’s low budget.
The protagonists of the game are a group of outsiders from the so-called “Club de la Buena Estrella” who are involved in an accident at the beginning of the adventure. They find themselves in an abandoned amusement park below sea level, where they are forced to take part in a grueling “survival game”. This first act is misleading because the World End Club is not about life or death, but rather a journey where a group of young people face challenges in an unfamiliar environment.
The adventure surprises us every step of the way, be it through the construction of the world, the flashbacks or the moments in which important aspects of the plot are revealed. The World’s End Club is divided into two parallel stories that converge at some points in the game. The plot is designed to be viewed from both perspectives so that progress is relatively linear. The writers’ narrative expertise is pretty obvious, but unfortunately, that’s not the only thing that has affected their previous work at Spike Chunsoft.
Kodaka and Uchikoshi have storytelling experience using visual novels so you don’t know what’s going to happen next. However, amid the carefully scattered pieces of story, we often come across crude 2D platform missions with simple puzzles and bosses that add little to the title. As we said before, at the World End Club we slip into the role of a group of young people who, one by one, develop special superpowers: one can throw heavy objects, another spit fire, and another can reverse gravity so they can move on the ground or on the ceiling. These individual skills can only be used to a very limited extent. Because of this, the gameplay is designed to overcome an obstacle or two at the same time.
These missions are apparently intended to be variations on the main story, but because they’re so frustrating, they take a lot of the pace of the adventure. You will have to restart the platform parts many times as any obstacle will kill us instantly. The lack of instructions turns very simple challenges into unfair death traps, although luckily the autosave system is very generous, so the deaths (and some sporadic crashes that also occur with the Nintendo Switch version) won’t make us repeat too much .
In conclusion, it has to be said that the World End Club is neither very fun nor particularly creative in terms of design. The puzzles and platforms are very simple and the best part is that they don’t take very long to complete. The story has good moments because it manages to develop some exciting group dynamic that brings the boy gang together. Of course, there are some surprises that link meta-level to other titles from the Japanese studio, but this time Too Kyo Games failed to achieve its goal. Most of the time, the World End Club story is told in a hurry, with bad or hasty explanations and an attitude that often turns out to be ridiculous. The fact that this trip is about to be forgotten is the most disappointing as the strength of the study usually is to create lasting memories.
