

In the game, which will launch on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, players take on the character of Nobody - a featureless, mostly expressionless human (“this little white baby thing that has no clothes,” as Smith put it). Slug, bodybuilder, ghost - and 15 more forms await in Nobody Saves the World’s bizarre progression tree. The Zelda-like motifs may give the game an immediately recognizable appeal, but the progression through a bizarre tree of 18 different “forms” - involving a horse, a ranger, an egg, a stage magician, and a bodybuilder - and acquiring and combining their perks, is what most distinguishes Nobody Saves the World. And after spending about an hour with Nobody Saves the World, I do see a reason for the comparison with Tactics.

“So, the initial pitch was talking about ,” Smith said, “and, also, dungeon crawling.”Ī decade after its founding, DrinkBox has done well at distilling winning gameplay loops from eclectic ideas and screwball humor. “I haven’t played myself, but I think they have some kind of a jobs system,” Smith said, “where you can assume the role of, like, a fisherman, or a mage, or a mime, and whichever role you assume, you can gain progress toward that role, and gain new abilities from that. It doesn’t sound like Smith was, either, when a DrinkBox developer originally pitched the concept a couple of years ago. The top-down, overworld/underworld environment of Nobody Saves the World, coming later this summer, instantly communicates you’ll be playing an action RPG, even if this doesn’t have the puzzle-solving for which Zelda is known.īut I was not expecting to hear Final Fantasy Tactics as the game’s other spiritual parent.

Asked for the creative inspirations behind his studio’s next game, DrinkBox Studios co-founder Graham Smith first nodded to The Legend of Zelda, and that makes perfect sense.
