The Experience Of A Heavily Flawed Game

Review by ethan2009 on Sunday, August 2nd 2020
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Click to play The Inner Worlds

The Inner Worlds is a game created by gaminator

The Experience Of A Heavily Flawed game

Hey all, Ethan2009 back here with another review. On my journey of conquering long and difficult games on the site, I decided to beat The Inner Worlds… and succeeded. And I have to say, the game took a huge wrong turn.

The Inner worlds was an old EGD entry which I had enjoyed in the past but never actually tried to beat it. I praised it highly and was planning on suggesting it for the EGL until my third attempt and beating the game. The Inner Worlds went from a fun, easy, laid back game, to a stressful game where you would die if you made a single mistake. Obviously, in any sploder game, this will ruin a game no matter how good its start is, and I feel like Gami was trying to slowly weed out players so that no one would win.



Gameplay:



The Inner Worlds has a strong start when it comes to gameplay. Interesting enemy sequences paired with other creative ideas made the game fun. However, Gami started to dot the map with parkour and sword climbing making some parts of the game completely unplayable without using the pause glitch. Adding platforming over lava on level 8 - around 40 minutes into the game - makes for a frustrating death. Spamming pause and hoping to climb into a specific area is not what I’d consider being fun either. Even if it may seem that I am only criticizing the game, I have to give credit where it’s due. Sidequests were well done, and the player could explore multiple areas of the map in the early to midgame levels without punishment. The game itself seemed to deteriorate from level 7 onwards and became a struggle of survival, however, the last two levels seemed to pick up where the earlier game left off, though not quite as strong. All in all, the gameplay starts off strong and weakens, and towards the end becomes decent.



Scenery:



Although some parts of the Inner Worlds might lack fun gameplay, it was always interesting to see what the scenery would be in the next environment. Level 3 and 4 created not just a map, but an entire atmosphere instead. The scenery created an immersive experience for the player to enjoy and had unique elements. Without spoiling too much, I will say the start of level 11 had some very creative scenery. However, not every part about the decoration in The Inner Worlds was perfect - some parts of the game lacked proper lighting and seeing without using a torch could be difficult. In fact, there was not sufficient health or armor for the player to use their torch instead of their shield, so the player was forced to travel blind, ruining the atmosphere. More creative uses of tiles could have made a better environment in the later levels, but the tone for each level was conveyed well, so no complaints from me on that.




Placement:



I really, really hate platforming. I know it’s called the platformer creator, but slippery controls make platforming a chore more than fun. Unfortunately, Gaminator used platforming where the player had to break their “P” key in an attempt to succeed. The fact that Gaminator doesn’t know what a ladder is makes this much worse. Sections, where the player had to try multiple times to swordclimb up a ledge without ladder or platforms to pause on, were brutal and ruined the flow of the game. The enemy placement was usually on point, though, with the exception being an excess number of bats near a platforming area. Gaminator utilized burst blocks and teleporters to drop enemies at perfect timing, which was honestly very creative. I felt that there were too many minibosses and bosses sometimes as the final boss was very similar to every other one used in the game, and I played against it in a similar fashion.



Final Thoughts And Conclusions:



Instead of going on and on with specific categories without enough to fill each one, I wanted to touch up on each aspect of the game and reinforce previous points. The difficulty was extremely unbalanced. In the early game, it was a breeze to pass through each level and progress quickly to the next. With a sudden jump from easy on level 7, to “oh my goodness I’ve been on one health the entire game since level 8”. The lava parkour and cheap obstacles didn’t help either. I thought the creativity in The Inner Worlds was great. After many years of people making platforming games, coming up with new concepts to base a game around is hard, nearly impossible. Even if Gaminator wasn’t the first to create each idea, he used things like burst tiles to his advantage and changed rare ideas up and kept them fresh throughout the game. Execution of concepts such as these was near perfect. It was clear that Gaminator tested the early and middle levels frequently, and it paid off. The story also kept me wondering what came next. I don’t want to spoil the end of the story but it did feel quite abrupt. The dialogue could have been used better to direct the player where to go better as well.


PROS:

Creative Scenery

EGL Worthy Start

Fun Sequences

Interesting Story

CONS:

Terrible Placement

Too many sand blocks

Errors in enemy placement on level 10

Ratings:

Gameplay: 8/10

Scenery: 9/10

Placement: 4/10

Difficulty: 3/10

Creativity: 9/10

Execution: 8/10


Overall: 8/10


Taking an average of these scores would be a crime. If gaminator were to fix the placement and remove the lava parkour on level 8, and add some ladders, the difficulty would be in the 8’s or 9’s, and the placement would be just as high. A real shame an EGL worthy game diminished in a rage-inducing try-not-to-break-your-laptop simulator. If Gaminator Fixes these complaints and sends me a private copy of levels 8 and beyond, I’ll edit this review and suggest The Inner Worlds for the EGL where it would belong.

See ya!





 
 


The Inner Worlds Reviewed by ethan2009 on Sunday, August 2nd 2020. The Experience Of A Heavily Flawed Game - A game review written by ethan2009 for the game 'The Inner Worlds' by gaminator. Rating: 4