Nobody Saves The World
DrinkBox’s shapeshifting action-RPG is on form
PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series
An injection of chaos is the making of DrinkBox’s latest. You can see it in the art style of this top-down dungeon-crawler which has the anarchic, slightly unsettling edge of a late-night cartoon (it’s no real surprise when the studio mentions Ren & Stimpy as an early visual reference point). It’s present in the unusual combinations of characters and abilities you discover as you tool around with different loadouts: a bow-wielding turtle, anyone? And it’s particularly apparent when you rummage around inside your magician’s hat for a rabbit and produce something, well, a little more dangerous and toothsome. A ‘familiar but different’, if you will.
That, of course, is pretty much the DrinkBox MO. Rather than breaking new ground, it’s established itself by generally staying within genre constraints – albeit while poking at the fringes, nudging and elbowing them into stranger, more intriguing shapes. So, yes, this is a classic tile-based top-down adventure with an old-school Zelda overworld and randomised Diablo-ish dungeons. But it’s also a little more than that. This may be a story about a calamity having befallen a fantasy land, in which a silent hero with special powers is tasked with saving the day, but that protagonist is a nondescript nobody – a blank-eyed, colourless baby – and those special powers let you transform into a horse or a zombie.
Eventually, at least. But our shapeshifting career begins with us assuming the guise of a rat.
In this form we have a quick gnawing attack that gradually poisons enemies while
A top-down dungeon-crawler with the anarchic, unsettling edge of a late-night cartoon
regaining mana that we can spend on a lifeleech move that lets us recover any health we’ve lost. “It’s kind of like a builder-finisher style,” DrinkBox co-founder Graham Smith explains, noting that this is one of around 15 to 20 different forms that you unlock as you progress. To do that, you need to complete quests, which earn you stars to unlock dungeons while also ranking up your existing form. You’re never simply grinding monsters for XP – though you’ll need to do plenty of that to complete some of the quests. More often, it’s about how you do it. It starts simple, with you having to poison a given number of enemies, but “later on they’ll become more of a puzzle,” lead designer Ian Campbell says, explaining that in some cases that will entail finding unusual combinations of active and passive abilities.
With a fighting monk, a bronzed strongman, a ghost and a robot among your forms, you’re rather spoiled for choice in the
later stages. And with certain enemies boasting magic wards that must be broken with a specific type of damage (sharp, blunt, light or dark) before you can hurt them, there’s plenty of encouragement to shapeshift. Even when you gain the ability to mix and match, the need to complete quests to gain stars to unlock later dungeons discourages you from sticking to one overpowered build once you’ve tinkered with different combinations. Though when you do earn enough stars to enter the more challenging legendary dungeons, each of which will come with their own mechanical twists, quests will be disabled. “What we’re intending is that when you go inside, you’re more focused on just trying to get through here with your best form and your best abilities,” Smith explains. “Because of the greater difficulty, we don’t want you to have to think about quests at all.”
Beneath those artfully wonky edges, in other words, this is a typically refined DrinkBox game, its snappy controls and smart systems combining in an entertaining 20-hour dungeon-crawler. It’s the kind of game in which a good deal of effort has been invested in making it feel so effortless. And then sometimes – just often enough – it reaches into its hat and pulls out a tiger.