Game Recs

You need to play the most inventive indie RPG on Xbox Game Pass ASAP

Learn to love the grind.

by Robin Bea

Nobody Saves the World may sound like a grim indictment of apathy in the face of a climate apocalypse, but it’s actually just a clever action RPG. Whew!

The latest from Guacamelee developer Drinkbox Studios, Nobody Saves the World brings the studio’s lighthearted writing to the RPG genre, with one brilliant twist that keeps its level grind from going stale.

Like in most RPGs, you start off as a pathetic weakling in way over your head. In this case, you’re Nobody, a pale blob one step above a stick figure with no abilities other than a feeble slap.

After snagging a wand from a mysteriously absent wizard, you’re granted the power to change into more than a dozen different forms, each with its own set of abilities.

At first, the forms range from RPG stalwarts like a soldier and an archer to decidedly more bizarre classes like a rat and a horse. It only gets more strange from there, with robots, slugs, and one form that’s just an egg.

The archer fires arrows, while the rat munches on enemies. Attacks gain elemental damage types and use varying amounts of mana to add more strategy to your choice of forms.

The coup de grace that makes Nobody Saves the World extremely dangerous for your free time is how it handles quests. No seeking out townspeople who need wolves killed here.

With the exception of a few that you buy from merchants, all of Nobody Saves the World’s quests come to you dynamically. Each form has its own quests, with new ones arriving when you complete existing ones or level up.

The quests push you to use your form’s abilities in different ways and — once you unlock the feature a few hours in — to combine abilities from different forms.

If you want to keep growing in Nobody Saves the World, you’ll need to change the way you play constantly, switching forms on the fly and using your toolkit in increasingly elaborate ways.

That’s good news because with a rigid class system or more traditional quests, Nobody Saves the World would get old fast. It is essentially one long dungeon crawl, albeit with plenty of variety in enemies and environmental hazards to keep you on your toes.

With one killer feature implemented extraordinarily well, Nobody Saves the World stands out in a crowded genre and elevates the grind to an art form.

Nobody Saves the World is available on Xbox, Steam, and Game Pass.

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