WILL: A Wonderful World (PC) Review

The player assumes the role of a, seemingly, young girl, who is the goddess that will play the role of fate itself. Since she has lost her memory, though, a dog-like god (or is it a god-like dog?) will help her understand her powers - in other words, this furry fellow will provide the tutorial, along with some enjoyably funny responses to the goddess' naivety. Wait, though, a visual novel with a tutorial? Well, WILL: A Wonderful World is not a typical example of the genre.

Instead of just experiencing a story, and making a few decisions along the way, this bridges the gap between visual novels and traditional adventure games, offering the chance to do a bit more than that. Being a god, you can alter the fate of humans, and then, if you don't like the result, do so once again. The way that all this will be done is very simple, as all you do is read a story, and then move a couple of sentences around to, hopefully, change the outcome for the better.

Of course, not everything can be moved, but only just a few specific sentences. Even with those, however, the flexibility to experiment is quite good. Furthermore, after the initial, tutorial-esque examples, the rest of the experience is about handling two separate stories at the same time, so it's possible to move a sentence from story 'A' to 'B' - for example, moving "The light went off" from a story where that would lead to something bad, to one where it won't really matter.

Most importantly, WILL lets you rewrite history, as well, by going back to a story and trying something different. In fact, many times throughout this, you will be able to go back to a story segment after completing another one, and discover new sentences to play with. Thus, each "chapter" includes a variety of endings, something that completionists will love. Sadly, this is also the perfect time to talk about the flaws.

One has to actually think about the choices on offer and have a detective-like approach to it all, pay attention to the details of a story, and then hopefully make the right decisions and reach the desired outcome. Unfortunately, most endings just end up feeling wrong, as they don't seem to follow any sort of logic. Yes, this title plays with the theme of the 'Butterfly Effect,' so that's to be expected, but it's handled in a way that gives away a feeling of dissatisfaction.

This is something that makes you feel less excited with going back to try all the different paths, as rarely is there a feeling of truly being in control. Furthermore, for something with so many decisions to make, WILL: A Wonderful World belongs in that disappointing family of choice-based titles where choice frequently is an illusion, as the various separate stories available don't branch out as much as they will make you believe that they do.

As for the stories themselves, they are pleasant, well-written reads about a variety of characters, devoid of the usual genre tropes. Sure, nothing is of award-winning quality, but at least players will actually care about these little heroes and their struggles. Despite the room for improvement, the stories manage to be quite interesting - especially in the way they get tangled together, to the point where you can forgive the game mechanics from not being as impressive as they could or should have been.

The audio-visual part is somewhat lacking, though, with generic whimsical or tense tunes bopping along what's on-screen, which, most of the time, is just a wall of text with a silhouette of the protagonist on the side. Every now and then a snapshot of a certain event will appear but, while the art is generally decent-to-good, this needed much more than what's on offer.