WILL: A Wonderful World from Circle Entertainment is a neat puzzle/adventure game with a fun twist. Learn more in our WILL: A Wonderful World review!
There is an urban legend that states that if you write down your troubles on a note, hold it in your hand at midnight and pray “God, please help me…” God will hear your call and intervene to change your fate. You play as a girl who wakes you not knowing where she is or how she got there. A dog that appears before her, and who can talk, tells her that they are gods who must hear the pleas of humans who seek their help so that they can change their fates.
Things aren’t as simple as they seem since you need to remember that altering one person’s fate will also end up affecting the lives of other people. Your actions have big consequences, so you need to pay attention to what you are being asked to do by someone and how your decision will impact those around said, person. Will you find the best solution to the problems at hand? Will you?
Before you get started, you will need to select between the two available difficulty settings. Normal is for those of you that might not be used to playing games in the genre, and you will get some hints shown in red as you play through each level. But if you’re up for a challenge, you should give Lunatic a go so that you don’t get any hints and can put your logic and deduction skills to good use. You can change the difficulty at any time if you feel that Lunatic is too hard, or if you’re breezing through Normal.
Since you seem to have lost your memory, Will (he’s the one that sorta does look like a dog, but who is not a dog… oh, and you look like a human girl, but you’re not – remember that you are gods!) will give you a test: solving the problem of a human. The first letter you get (and the only letter I will talk about since I don’t want to spoil the experience for you), is from someone who has lost her keys after practicing tennis at a local community-managed court with a small light post that ended up going out at the end of her training session. She didn’t realize she had lost her keys at the tennis court until she got home, and she blames this on the light that went out.
You will get the letter from each human, and it will be sliced into different parts. Some of these will be black, and some will be white. The black pieces cannot be moved, but you can rearrange the white ones to try and solve the predicament at hand. The exception to this is that white pieces can’t go past the first or the last piece of a letter. By rearranging the pieces, you will be able to alter the order in which events take place. Any new terms that are important will be added to your Dictionary so that you can reference it if needed, and you will also get some extra information about the term, which will help you to better understand the setting and context.
Sometimes you will get more than one letter at once. You’ll need to review each letter separately, but once you’ve done this, you can switch between the letters with the L and R buttons. But why do you get more than a single letter when you check the mailbox at the bottom left of the screen? Because that means that the pleas from the humans are related since they take place at the same time! The actions you change from one letter will certainly impact the other one, especially since you can move white parts between both letters, which makes it a bit trickier to find the perfect solution that will give you an S rank. Scenarios might have more than one ending, so if you want to 100% the game, you will need to get an S rank as well as a gold star, which means that you’ve seen all possible endings for an event.
You’ll need to also pay attention to the color of some of the words in your conversations with your fellow not-a-dog god, as well as of the words in the letters you receive. Orange text features truly important information, while yellow text will highlight digital messages in a text message or an email. Blue will be used for highlighting messages in a fax or a note. If you’re playing in normal mode, hints will be highlighted in red.
You should make sure to save every now and then when you’re in the area where you receive letters and help humans. Just press the + button to open the Menu so that you can select the save option. Once you do this, the game will prompt you to select a slot in which to save. The game also has an auto-save feature, but having separate manual saves will allow you to load your run exactly where you want to. You’ll be taught a lesson early in the game about what could happen if this one didn’t kindly offer an auto-save function, so be ready!
The game features an achievements list for you to complete. These include, of course, completing the game, but there are also miscellaneous achievements to unlock that have to do with particular characters and scenarios, which makes it hard to talk about them without spoiling your experience. The ones I can mention are awarded to you for getting started with the game, winning a card game, making a sacrifice for the safety of the people, completing 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the album, and completing 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the dictionary.
WILL: A Wonderful World is an entertaining visual novel/puzzle game with an interesting gameplay loop. The stories of the characters you will get to interact with are interesting and will encourage you to come back to the game as you learn more about them and how their lives interact with the rest. You’re looking at 8-10 hours to complete the game depending on how good you are at finding the solution to each puzzle, and if you go for finding 100% of all endings for each scenario.
Disclaimer
This WILL: A Wonderful World review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Circle Entertainment.
