The World Next Door

Art is cute, mechanics are fun, and it's like reading through your fav teen novel. I always find myself gravitating back to it. I would recommend many people to play it, even if it may not be everyone's cup of tea. It deserves more recognition.

It’s nice to have a pure puzzle game to review. Story: Once a generation a portal opens between the human world and a magical monster world and the two worlds host a festival where lottery winners from both worlds can visit the other. One winner, Jun, spends the day hanging out with her pen-pal Liza and her friends and while they hang out in a sewer level, a rouge monster ambushes them and Jun misses the portal home. But with her friends by her side and a ticking clock of her dying due too much magic, she is going to find a way home. It’s a pretty simple story. We find a macguffin early on which becomes the solution to the portal problem. We got stakes in the whole dying thing. And we got a friend group to both fresh out the world and for some comedy and teen drama consisting of the best friend, the shy friend, the smart friend, the aloof friend, the preppy friend and the jerk who they hang out for some reason. However, I must say the ending feels like there should have been more there. Early on your made aware of some missing people with one of them being Liza’s girlfriend and in the endgame we there is a shadowy conspiracy going on. The results of both are a little underwhelm…

Cute and fun, with chaotic match-three combat and great art. The ending definitely leaves room for a sequel...I hope we'll see one some day!

Short game but it has a nice gameplay, very simple connect-3 but with its own originality by combining it with in real time combat

I have mixed feelings. So the art style is nice, the match 3 battle system is interesting, but the visual novel part is sooo boring. But 2 vs 1, so thumbs up!

Basically what all the other reviews say. The ending is a real kick in the ♥♥♥♥ if you don't know that a lot of what was setup won't be paid off in any meaningful sense. But I think I probably would've enjoyed this game if I had read the reviews first and went into it knowing that it would end too soon. The art and character interactions before that point have a good amount of charm and the price is incredibly low even when not on sale. Beware, but if you're reading this then consider if a 4 hour game that feels like a university-AU fanfic of a different story is something you'd be interested in and maybe you'll have a different answer than me.