The World Next Door

The World Next Door is a frustrating game. It presents a story about alterity, introducing a world of magical creatures just a portal away from ours, with a protagonist that feels more at ease in this alien environment than at home. It subverts match-three puzzle games, creating a dynamic combat system that requires constant movement and thinking. And then it throws everything out of the window by refusing to develop its themes, its characters, its world, and its mechanics.

The game’s protagonist is Jun, a human girl who “has been dreaming of leaving Earth her entire life,” and that suddenly has the opportunity to visit the world of Emrys for a single day after she wins the lottery. However, after hanging out with her new friends, Jun fails to go back in time to the portal that would bring her back to Earth. Now she has to find a way to return to her world before Emrys’ toxic atmosphere claims her life.

The World Next Door can give a great first impression. Its premise has room to grow and the story is rife with mysteries from the get-go: why does Jun hate her life? Why the portal between worlds is not always opened? How does Emrys work? How can Jun find her way back? And does she want to? As these questions begin to pile up, Jun discovers that some mystical shrines may guard the solution to her problem, and encounters a suspicious figure that claims to know everything about her situation.

The game also has an easy-going atmosphere going for it, marked by vibrant colors, upbeat music, and dialogues packed with teen energy. The mysterious shrines Jun has to visit, for example, are described as “super secret, definitely forbidden, totally cool, magical places.” The characters Jun meets all have striking and unique looks, such as Cerisse, a girl that resembles a unicorn with her white hair and a single horn on the forehead, or Jun’s best friend Lisa, who looks like a Succubus with her purple hair, red skin, sharp teeth, and tail. There are even some playful designs such as Nana’s: a wolf dressed as a girl.

With these designs, the game works well with the concept of alterity: although most of them look like terrible monsters – there is a guy named Horace whose head is a skull with flaming eyes – they are all friendly and nice to Jun. The message, then, is a simple but important one: it’s not because they’re different that they’re evil or dangerous.

The development of this theme of “otherness” doesn’t go beyond that, however, as the story of The World Next Door, although full of promise, goes nowhere. It presents a lot of mysteries, but solves very few of them. It hints at a bigger world and at a complex plot, but the story never stirs in that direction. Jun has to find a way back to Earth through magical shrines and that is the exact extent of her journey.

To say that a lot of things go unexplained in The World Next Door is an understatement. From the most basic elements of the plot – the magical shrines are linked to the portal, because… magic, I guess – to the big reveals at the end, nothing makes much sense. Take for example the character that claims to know everything that is happening to Jun: there is no reason for him to hold back the information for so long since he gains nothing with the delay. He doesn’t reveal the truth to Jun outright simply because that would be narratively boring. It’s artificial suspense without payoff.

Jun herself has no apparent reason to hate Earth. The intro states that she feels out of place in her homeland, and she acts like it, but what is behind this feeling is anyone’s guess. There’s a scene in which she avoids talking about her family… and that’s it. And to make matters a lot worse, although she is the game’s protagonist, Jun has no semblance of a character arc. She is just there. And the same can be said about all of her friends. Not only do most of them never go through any sort of emotional journey, but some of them are even useless plot-wise, failing to do a single thing to move the story forward. Vesper and Lux are the worst offenders, since they create a bit of tension when they first enter the group, but that goes nowhere as well and they don’t do anything important afterward. Even the game’s few sidequests have little purpose to them, rewarding the player with useless items.

It’s no surprise, then, that the ending is also lackluster. In a baffling design decision, the player can choose between two final outcomes, but one of them – and the most obvious choice – has no twist, no climax, nothing to it all: the characters conclude their business, fight a random monster as a final boss and the credits roll. The other ending has some reveals up its sleeve, but even they don’t mean anything. If it had instead been revealed that Jun is actually a Martian from Jupiter that filmed the Moon’s landing alongside Kubrick, it would have had the exact same impact on the story and feel as arbitrary as what actually happens, but maybe with the added benefit of being funnier. Again, you can see hints of grander twists, such as a possible secret identity for the final boss, but it’s so loose that it doesn’t matter: no character reacts to it, or discovers it, or anything. There is no confirmation of this supposed identity, and players will be left wondering if it’s not just wishful thinking on their part.

The moment that perfectly encapsulates the game’s various problems is when the intro claims that Jun is about “to experience what life is like in the world next door.” Because she actually doesn’t have a chance to do that. There are only three areas you can “explore”: a courtyard, a marketplace, and a basketball court. You are far from understanding how Emrys is like when you are confined to these three random environments for the entirety of the game. The intro promises adventures and surprises, but its limited scope and anticlimactic story don’t deliver.

On the gameplay department, The World Next Door can frustrate the player in the exact same way: it presents something interesting but just leaves it there, underdeveloped. The combat works like this: Jun walks on a grid of symbols, alongside her enemies. You must match the symbols by walking into one, selecting it, moving towards the others, and pressing the action button if there are three or more selected. Doing so activates a spell that corresponds to the symbol matched: red ones launch a fireball, while yellow ones electrify nearby enemies. It’s similar to Puzzle Quest, but, since you walk on the board, you have to match them while dodging enemy fire, making for a more frantic and dynamic system.

It’s great at first, but the developers couldn’t find a way to make it increasingly interesting. The first fights play out exactly like the last ones: there is no real sense of progression, no variety, not a single new mechanic. Some bosses try to act differently than common enemies, but they die so quickly that they never have the time to leave a mark. The only thing you gain as you progress in the game is the opportunity to choose more friends to summon when matching white symbols. In the end, just like with its story, it’s just a lot of wasted potential.

The World Next Door feels so unfinished that it ends up being marked more by what it doesn’t do than by what it does. A game can’t survive on good ideas alone; it must develop them as well, and The World Next Door never does that.

July 17, 2019.