Review
Sandworld Online by Sandybandit has you playing a sapient NPC in an MMORPG on the brink of destruction. The toxic behavior of its human players is somehow breaking the game’s engine, which presumably will lead to the death of its AI NPCs. Of the five games submitted in this jam, Sandworld Online feels the most like it’s going for a 90s-era Japanese RPG vibe. It’s not too focused on puzzle-solving or combat specifically, and seems primarily concerned with bringing the world alive for its player.
Sandworld currently only consists of a prologue quest and a few locations to walk around in, but does a great job with its plot set up. Your character, a quest-giving NPC with an amusing resemblance to Kite from .hack, wakes up to a routine day of listening to other AIs gripe about player behavior and goes off to do their job: asking players to bring the town water. When you enter the item shop, however, you’re told that you’re a secret failsafe designed to protect the game’s code, and are given a The Matrix-esque choice to take a red or blue pill. The blue pill puts you back in bed as though nothing happened, but the red pill gives you access to the same abilities that players have. This enables you to leave your assigned town, fight monsters, equip items, etc. With these new abilities, you can take on the game’s only quest: enter a small dungeon and fight a player.
As simple and sparse as this game is, I found it really charming. The MMO conceit turns a lot of what would feel like unremarkable interactions into some pretty good jokes. I chuckled when I talked to an NPC whose job was just to say, “We’re bandits!” for example, when I think that interaction would not have landed so well in another game. In another location, an NPC guards a castle and refuses to let you in unless you have a good reason, then says “and there is no good reason in the game.” There are quite a few small locations like this in the game world that don’t really connect to anything just yet, but felt inviting to walk around in and talk to NPCs just to see how the author would use it to express the MMO theme. Even things like the weirdly boxy and grid-like town design worked because it evoked an artificial world more than it did a real town, which felt right for this game. Overall, I appreciated that even though there wasn’t much plot to see, Sandybandit recognized that the world was the core appeal of their submission and let us look at more of it than may have been “ready”, so to speak.
As this game is only about 20 minutes long, I think it would be a little silly to overanalyze its combat, map design, etc. What I would recommend to Sandybandit would be to play to the strengths they displayed in making this submission. The almost freeform feel to walking around without many obstacles was great and felt properly like an MMO world. The dialogue was also fun to read. I’d say put the bulk of your work towards these elements, and really dig into what you can use the MMO premise to explore. Let me talk to some monster enemies, help an NPC with their player behavior problem, walk in on an in-game GM meeting, etc. Most of all, I’d like to see more environmental interaction. What’s different about these barrels, paintings, etc. because they’re MMO objects and not real ones? And is there a way an NPC might think to use them to her advantage to advance in the game that a normal MMO player might not?
This entry was short but sweet. If you stick with what’s fun about this demo for what you add later, I have no doubt this will be a great and memorable experience.