“Demo Disk” – World’s End Club (2021) [Switch]

Demo Disk is a series of first impressions posts for new releases and quick opinions.

Clear blue skies and warm summer days
We have to find the courage within!
For whatever comes our way
Our great adventure’s about to begin

— From the Go-Getter’s Club Theme

World’s End Club is the new game from the dream-team lineup of Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi, the creators behind Danganronpa and the Zero Escape/Nonary Games series, respectively.

Unbelievably, though, given its pedigree, World’s End Club carries only a T rating for “mild violence”–and even that is probably overstating the danger this game poses for impressionable young players. What little violence there is cartoonishly low-stakes, far from the gory set-pieces of 999 or its sequels. The colorful cast of kids steers well clear of the “mature” themes of Danganronpa, too. Romance here skews cute and bashful, not pervy and M-rated.

The game opens with a half-hour or so of false starts and playful misdirection. As if mocking their own past work, the creators show us clips from a realistic-looking horror movie, watched within the game by the young heroes who don’t understand any better than the player why this weird stuff is being shown to them. A stock mascot-villain type character appears to break the fourth wall right up front (at which point shouldn’t it really be the first wall?) and our spunky club members find themselves trapped in an undersea amusement park, forced to play a “game of fate” only one of them can win… The bulk of the game actually takes the form of a light-hearted road trip, much like the bus ride in the field-trip portion of this jumpy prologue.

The gameplay might be most surprising of all. In an interesting move, World’s End Club takes the well-established mechanics of escape-the-room or find-the-culprit puzzle-solving that usually accompany visual novel storytelling and replaces them with clunky platforming segments. What could have been an engaging spin on the genre comes across instead as another bit of self-ridicule. As I died time and again due to my characters’ lethargic responsiveness or unexpected collisions with objects I took to be safe, I reflected that the creative directors and developers must have been very sophisticated to make their new game this bad on purpose. In the lead-up to the end credits, the game even crashed. Fortunately, none of my progress was lost.

It took me about 10 hours to reach a bad end, and 5 more to reach a good one, which I’m assuming is the true ending. I only put this much time into World’s End Club in the first place because of its promise as an entry point to visual novels for younger players, particularly those with an interest in Japanese language or culture. Where Uchikoshi and Kodaka normally release gnarly masterpieces, well worth the effort of replaying to unlock additional content, World’s End Club’s branching storylines are solid enough, but nothing compared to the complexity or aha moments provided by those earlier games.

Skip this one. But maybe send it to a little kid in your life. They could do worse as far as summer reading. Though the game is awkward at times, the underlying themes of friendship and determination shining through it are perennial.

Wesley Schantz coordinates the Video Game Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA.