It recently dawned upon me that Teslagrad 2 came out about a week ago, but then I noticed that the main character, Lumina, was actually one of the starting characters from World to the West, a mostly forgotten title that was dubbed "a standalone followup of Teslagrad." I find this description to be rather misleading despite the relationship, because I don't think the two play or feel similarly at all. The original Teslagrad was a fairly compact and straightforward 2D metroidvania platformer; sure, it wasn't anything groundbreaking at the time and some of the boss fights were annoying, but it knew exactly what it wanted to be and accomplished just that in its short runtime. World to the West on the other hand, is much more ambitious, focusing on the exploration of a sprawling map in a connected top-down overworld (think: 2D Zelda dungeoneering set in a faraway landscape), but with its own twist of simultaneously utilizing four different protagonists to thoroughly comb the different environments and save the world from imminent destruction. Unfortunately, the game suffers from a glaring fundamental issue: at no point does your gang of four ever feel like a cohesive unit.

Every character essentially acts on their own; they have their own separate health gauge (with any health augmentations only applying to the character that collects said powerup), they all have their own save data of collected totems that can be used as fast travel/checkpoint poles, and you can only control one character at a single time. To switch between characters, you must backtrack to any totem and switch-off at those points to other characters which may be located anywhere across the map depending on where you left them beforehand. The result is that World to the West feels less like a Cookie & Cream like, which requires simultaneous juggling of multiple entities on the same screen to clear paths, and instead functionally resembles Donkey Kong 64 and its respective character-swap system.

It's a real shame, because on paper, it's actually pretty fun controlling each individual protagonist. Your four different characters all have different abilities and physiques to take advantage of varying scenarios across the map. Lumina the Teslamancer can quickly blink through bars/over gaps and power switches, Knaus the orphan can tunnel under hazards/walls and ice skate across water, Miss Teri the explorer has a scarf to grapple across ledges and can mind-control local wildlife to do her bidding, and Lord Clonington the pugilist can shatter barriers and quickly scale walls. In practice, however, the circumstances often interfere with your degree of control; every environment should be navigable by each protagonist, but that doesn't mean that every protagonist can reach that destination within each particular sector of the map alone. Oftentimes, the different paths that the protagonists must take are greatly stratified to the point where individual characters must backtrack several rooms down to access a completely different path for the same destination. The resources for all characters are too spread apart here for everyone to fully function as expected on each screen, and this flaw is further exacerbated because many of the necessary paths are gated by character specific obstacles that require you to travel out of your way to steer other protagonists that already have their pathing figured out elsewhere. The map is also quite bare and doesn't show any symbols to indicate specific protagonist-coded obstacles, so you may want to keep a notepad on hand so you don't forget about what lies in the way and can clear the necessary obstacles as soon as possible.

To sum this issue up, obstacles are often strewn about "unrelated" paths that block off other characters, and are not telegraphed in advanced or even marked upon discovery, which means that you have to further backtrack to totem poles to switch characters. That's of course, assuming that you've already made it to said totem pole with the necessary character to break down said barrier, because totem pole progress is character-specific, so chances are, you'll have to figure out another path just to get that character to the necessary checkpoint to begin the process anew. It's this vicious cycle of having to constantly check the scant map and slowly moving characters back and forth between new checkpoints that you know exist but don't have saved (because the story chapters just focus on one or two characters moving around specific sections of the map at a time), and then ferrying across every single character to slowly inch across the overworld once you figure out your new destination or need to collect another battery (15 required to unlock a mandatory gate) to progress the plot. Do you enjoy playing the same map four different times just to get your whole party from point A to point B? That's what this felt like the entire time.

The payoff just isn't there to justify this padding. Outside of the scripted story events where a couple characters interact at any given time to unlock new abilities, there's never any sense of camaraderie between your four protagonists; you can talk to any unused character while they're resting at a specific totem pole, and that's all the extra dialogue you will ever get. Since characters generally end up traveling their own paths between each destination (with the common exception of removing barriers for other characters, one step at a time), there's never any sense of cooperation outside of those scant moments and it feels less like Dungeon Duos and more like Octopath Traveler. The pacing feels like the final nail in the coffin here, with the first eight chapters just focusing on one or two specific characters at a time and making sure the player understands the abilities of each character; you don't really get let loose until chapter nine, which ends up taking over 50% of the run time since it then becomes mandatory to more thoroughly explore the overworld with the full party available to reach the final chapter. It's over in a flash once you've reached this point of no return; the final boss is fairly straightforward (and I would argue, easier than many of the story fights earlier on) and the dialogue-free ending cutscene afterwards leaves a lot to be desired.

Needless to say, I could not be bothered to 100% this game. There's a nice little backstory regarding the land's lore revealed from collecting all the different batteries, but I was absolutely exhausted from having to play the same areas over and over again within such a short time span and my goodwill only eroded every time I had to backtrack further to find alternative paths of travel. It definitely doesn't help that a lot of the unlockable treasure chests scattered throughout just provide coin that as far as I can tell, serve no use other than buying maps to find more batteries that I'd naturally stumble upon through discovery anyways. The lack of meaningful interaction between the cast and the underwhelming send-off was just the cherry on top of this unrealized jumble that could have been so much more. Thankfully I'm still looking forward to Teslagrad 2 from the little I've played so far, but as it stands, this will remain the tale of how the West was lost.