Ranked #77
990 Points
Otherworld is a collaborative roleplaying game that takes place in a limbo between life and death. Your character died some time between the years of 1530 and 1800 AD. Instead of landing in Heaven, they landed in a strange world where you start off with nothing and have to craft every item from scratch, including iron and steel. All the characters exist in the same, shared world. You can unlock zones and locations to advance further and discover new resources. Lead lost souls into their destinations to earn coins and purchase items and livestock. Check out the Trello board (link available on the website) to read about potential new features and suggest your own for a chance to influence the direction the game develops. Actions use either AP, which is gained once an hour, or timers, with repeats ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. The game is designed for people who spend a lot of time on the computer and like stopping by to carry out short actions between browsing. The game includes a separate chat for each location. Currently there is no worldwide chat, but this might eventually change.
I played this for 50 minutes. The start menu is clearly just a placeholder and has no graphics. The first thing I noticed is that the help question mark in the corner doesn't work, so I was on my own from the start, figuring out the controls. When you hover over the question mark, it says How to, but clicking on it does nothing. Here are the controls that I figured out: ASDW are used for moving. I opens inventory. J opens skills, which only has spears skill. B is build. You can build houses and chests. E is supposed to open containers but it's really hard to be in the correct spot to trigger it. It should trigger from in front of the chest.
You can collect apples, stone, wood and water by clicking on them. It says in the lower right corner when you collect a resource, but it's very close to the edge of the screen. When you stand on water and drink, the water keeps respawning so you're not actually losing any from your inventory. Probably because being on the water triggers harvesting it. It took me a really long time to find the water. The game could benefit from a compass that points where home is, where water is and maybe which way you're supposed to go for quests. I was never able to figure out how to craft spears. When you click on a male villager, there are buttons to teach and spears but they are partially on top of each other. Since my skill is 0, I can't teach. I was able to reproduce with a female villager but she didn't give birth before I encountered a goblin that kept following me (he runs really fast) and eventually killed me. The goblin does 20 damage in one hit, while I wasn't able to hit him back. I tried clicking on him but nothing happened. Or if I did 20 damage to the goblin, it was unclear who was dealing damage to whom. I also tried hitting chickens but again, it's unclear if I'm dealing damage to them or they to me. Also in the beginning, I lost 20 health seemingly at random.
You can go to negative thirst and not die. Also when you eat apples, they first fill the red bar, then the orange bar. The eating/drinking mechanic is clunky, because you have to drag them to a box and it can be a long way if they are on the other side of the inventory grid.
The biggest flaw was that when you die, the popups prevent selecting a character to respawn as, so you can't actually respawn, so all you can do is restart or quit. It would be interesting to know how to craft spears. I tried dragging wood and stone into the weapon slot and also onto each other, but it just reordered them. Also you can't teach the female villager, just reproduce.
The level design has a lot of open areas. The area is bordered by steep hills, so if you go on the stony area, you eventually slide down. There's also a path to follow, which leads you to the goblin. After that, the goblin can find you anywhere and ambush you while you're for example drinking. The game could benefit from more help texts and maybe also a minimap, as well as that compass I mentioned earlier. Also the graphics could use some work. The camera is a bit weird and sometimes tree foliage blocks visibility.
More resources would also be good. But definitely the biggest flaw was not figuring out how to get/make a spear and not being able to fight the goblin unarmed, or if I was doing damage to it, it was unclear.
Aw man, I wrote a long reply but it only posted the first row and then apparently deleted all the rest because there was an emoji and apparently that breaks the system. Let's see if I can summarize it from memory. - I could allow players to create one character with an unverified email address. They can't really do permanent damage, since there is no permadeath in the game, but the other day (before I put a cap on characters) someone created 11 characters and beat up a couple of people, creating 200+ events in the chat. - I could potentially edit the game so that 1 minute turns into 10 seconds and so forth. Currently the shortest supported timer is 1 minute, but it's changeable with programming, it just requires a bit of work. I'm mainly concerned that since all characters share the same world, if one player crafts all the items, there will be nothing left to accomplish for ones who come later. Some sort of deterioration can be a solution, and also when characters turn inactive and go on vacation, their inventory is inaccessible to others. Since machinery is available to everyone in a location, some sort of breakage/upkeep would have to be introduced, as well as buildings turning into ruins after a while. - About NPCs, currently when someone has a baby, it turns into an NPC after 7 days and can then be used to gather resources for you. The NPCs have no dialog trees, so it's true the world feels empty when PCs aren't saying anything. I'm not experienced with writing dialogue, so I'm going to have to think about how to make the game feel more alive. - I agree a graphical map would be good. I'm going to have to think about what sort of a visual look to go with. I suppose I could create placeholder graphics and upgrade them later when the kinks are ironed out. Again, thanks for taking the time to review this. I really appreciate it.
1 year agoI played through the demo version. I found it quite challenging because I don't normally play platformers. In the 16th level, I kept dying a lot, I died so many times I lost count but I was eventually able to go through it. I don't know if it's possible to jump on the past Pete when he's jumping but I was just making him stand still, then standing on his head to jump further. It would have been more interesting to jump on him while he's moving, but I couldn't quite figure out how to work the controls smoothly. I think the game was giving instructions too early. I think it should have let the player figure things out on their own and only help if the player fails to get the current lesson. It felt a bit like handholding. It felt rewarding to finally beat the hard spot, and it was also good that you unlock an achievement if you die 5 times. It encourages you to keep trying just as you are getting frustrated.
1 year agoI got up to level 10 but at first, I was feeling ready to quit fairly early on, because I wasn't sure how sensitive the gravity is. Sometimes it's possible to balance a block on top of two towers, another time the towers topple over, which makes it seem like the weight of the block on top is pushing it apart, when in fact it seems that momentum has more of an effect. It's possible to put square blocks on top of round blocks - sometimes. It's hard to tell where the center of gravity is on a block because it's not marked. The darker area on the side of the block makes it harder to tell where the middle is because it's hard to tell if the dark area is considered to be on the same side or part of a 3D effect.
One thing I don't like is that sometimes the game forces you to build fast because things start falling over, so it makes you make rash decisions and just slap pieces down and hope to balance it out. It should be possible to reach a perfect balance so that you wouldn't have to rush.
I think there's a bug that occasionally makes clicking on the next level button count as two clicks, so it places the piece instantly and you have no way of controlling where it lands, usually causing you to lose the level. There should be a cooldown after a click where it doesn't register the event a second time even if something caused one click to read as two.
The graphics and pastel colors are cute and I like the cats and little cars. It's a bit confusing that some of the pieces have spinning clocks. Usually that signifies a time limit, but apparently they are just clocktowers and aren't timed. That part seems a bit misleading.
I like how the level names give a hint of how to solve the level. The name could be visible all the time in case you started the level too fast and missed what the title was.