Wantless: Solace At World’s End is a game that’s like Inception but just a little more twisted.
Wantless: Solace At World’s End is the developer Drop Rate Studio’s first game; it’s a small studio committed to developing RPGs with a strong focus on character progression, loot, equipment, stats, talents, upgrades, and perks in their games.
Twin Sails Interactive is known for games such as Ember Knights and Survival Fountain of Youth, and has been added to their publishing list. They have brought you Wantless: Solace At World’s End. This is a fast-paced tactical RPG set in a dystopian future that will have you facing off against the horrors made manifest within your patients’ minds.
Starting Wantless: Solace At World’s End, you are shown a cutscene that explains a little about the world, the situation surrounding it, and your place in it. After the cutscene, you are taken to a tutorial where you meet Eiris and Pum. You will also be introduced to gameplay and your first enemy types.
Moving around and using skills will be determined by your AP or action points, and while this sounds like a pretty straightforward concept, there is a catch – for every Action Point used, the enemies will gain the equivalent used in your turn for their turn, so strategy is your best friend.
After finishing the first tutorial in Wantless: Solace At World’s End, you are taken to your home base, which so happens to be a mobile clinic known as the Afterthought, where you will be shown how to work the neural forge. This is where you will forge your skills known as Form Synapses, Effect Synapses, and Efficiency Synapses; combining these will create new skills with new effects, along with how many of points required to use the skill during combat.
Then, after mastering the forge, you will be shown your new patients to work on, but there is another catch: you can only choose one patient at a time. Now, depending on which patient you choose will also decide what type of loot you’ll get after completing your objective, so choose carefully because you’ll lose the other two options once you’ve made your pick. The type of loot you get will also play a part in which skills you can forge, which can affect later gameplay.
When entering the mind of your patients, you will be faced with quite a variety of enemies, each with its name and description, such as Strife, Forgotten Egos, and Sour. Along with their names, they also have unique skills and traits, and unique and very beautifully twisted designs. After clearing a room, you will be given a choice of different passives for the run, such as Anger, which will add to your damage.
Alongside normal patients, you will also come across unique patients in Wantless: Solace at World’s End. These patients have their own stories that will add to the main story, such as losing their first unique patient due to strange changes and odd glitches in the mind maze. After being brought out of his mind, Eiris contacts a new character who simply goes by Doc, trying to get a second opinion on what went wrong.
With the dialogue with Doc done, you get to move on to the next area, but to move to the next area, you will need to get your reputation up, as getting your reputation will get you more patience and allow new areas to open up, which will give you access to more patients.
Other things in Wantless: Solace At World’s End to keep an eye out for will be your Transposer Logs, which will give you information on enemies, characters, allies, and areas. You will also get the chance to obtain a shop on the ship with a shady character called Deeler, where you can purchase some precious needed items to craft new skills and to outfit your character with new gear, such as the Abandon Robe, which can give unique passives like gaining resistance for every unspent AP.
When buying things from the trader, you will have two forms of currency for certain items. These currencies are Tokens and Knowledge Shards and can be obtained by completing challenges and exploration missions. Item prices will depend on the gear and synapses you purchase, and are either really affordable or kind of expensive. However, expensive doesn’t always mean it’s good, as all the skills will rely on how much AP is spent and how many turns it will take to cool down.
If you go down during combat, you will have revives at your disposal, known as Ankh. There are four types of Ankhs: Dull, Refined, Shifting, and the H-Ankh, which all have their own unique revive traits, such as bringing your health up to different levels and resetting your cooldowns.
While taking down and encountering certain enemies, you’ll have to deal with some leaving behind entrail remains, which will give buffs to the enemies and debuffs to your character, or summon other entities to help take you down. This isn’t a train smash, as using the environment and traps can help you take out groups without much issue.
As you progress with Wantless: Solace At World’s End, more areas on the boat will be unlocked, giving you access to more nodes, such as the Mind Tree, which will grant you passives for your runs, but these passives aren’t free. Like most things, you need to rack up Learning Points, which can be obtained by leveling up. However, there will also be obstacles in the way on the Mind Tree that will require keys to unseal Mind Paths to give you a more direct route to different passives.
The environments within the patients’ minds are somewhat gruesome, but do a brilliant job conveying a troubled mind, while the visuals are brilliant. Keep in mind that you will be able to use certain environments to your advantage, such as pushing enemies around the map, and the entities within each run convey their names as being both brutally gruesome yet epically awesome, along with the epic design of the enemies.
Sound design is incredibly edgy yet dark and mysterious, bringing you into the mindset of being in an unfamiliar domain and the fact that you need to tread carefully. The game’s environments and level designs are a mix of isometrics, old 90s cartoon animation, and coloring styles with immobile backgrounds, taking on passive tones of color, and moving aspects taking on more active colors.
Overall, Wantless: Solace at World’s End is a fun game with tons of mechanics, environments to explore, and challenges to experience. With character building, storyline, battle mechanics, and skill crafting, this game will definitely keep you entertained for hours.
