The mindless fun and near-infinite replayability of the action RPG makes it one of the most popular genres in gaming, but even for devoted players, spamming the same attacks over and over can get old. Maybe that’s why we’ve seen so many of these games take the roguelike route for some variety each time you venture into a dungeon, or even experiment with elements from entirely different genres, like Cult of the Lamb adding a fun city-builder between its dungeon-diving segments. Nobody Saves the World, which originally came out in 2022, instead keeps its combat fresh with a ridiculous number of character classes, and it’s available on PlayStation Plus this month.
Nobody Saves the World does away with typical classes like warriors and manages to ask the question, wouldn’t you rather be a rat instead? Probably not, but it turns out to be a lot of fun. We’ll get back to that in a bit.
You start Nobody Saves the World in a form called the Nobody — a black-and-white blob of a character with empty eyes and only a weak slap for an attack. But after you’re granted a wand in the game’s intro, you get the ability to transform into different classes, each with their own abilities and wildly different playstyle. By the end of Nobody Saves the World, you’ll have a whopping 17 classes to choose from, and you can swap between them to use their unique skills for every dungeon crawl.
But first, there’s the rat. You end up in prison early in Nobody Saves the World, and in a twist on the classic RPG trope of starting your adventure by exterminating rats, you can become one instead. At first, its main use is sneaking out of captivity, but the rat also has a poisonous bite and later gets the ability to detonate every enemy affected with poison. That’s the beauty of Nobody Saves the World — it finds ways to give its lowliest classes surprisingly powerful uses.
To unlock each new class, you need to level up the previous one. If there’s one major flaw to the game, it’s that gaining enough experience points to earn a new form is often a bit of a grind, and there’s no real variation in missions aside from the layout of each level.
Rather than give you different mission types, Nobody Saves the World tries to keep things fresh with modifiers on dungeons. In most cases, modifiers will add resistance or vulnerability to certain types of damage to encourage you to switch up which classes or abilities you’re using. That does a lot to make each one feel unique, but the more interesting twists come from modifiers like one that makes every hit fatal, forcing you to find novel solutions other than fighting every enemy.
Even if unlocking each new class takes a lot of work, getting to take a new set of abilities for a spin is always a treat. Getting to swap forms between a slug and a bodybuilder to tackle different challenges is just an experience you’re not going to get anywhere else. And just like the dungeon modifiers, some are straightforward but some are essentially puzzles that ask you to look at the game differently. It’s easy to figure out how to play a necromancer in combat. But what about an egg? That one takes some work to crack.
Progress far enough, and you’ll even be able to mix and match abilities from different classes. Once that option is on the table, Nobody Saves the World turns into way more of an exercise in strategic class building than its cartoony appearance might suggest. What the game lacks in environment and enemy variety, it more than makes up for in the wild number of ways you can devise to mow down your foes.
All that makes Nobody Saves the World perfect for PlayStation Plus. It might not be the kind of game you pick up and devote all of your time to, but as a satisfying adventure you can dip in and out of whenever you want to find a creative new way to clear a dungeon, it’s hard to beat.
