The End Of The World is a mobile story driven game developed by Sean Wenham. The End Of The World got my attention for its art style and smooth animation, which really made me want to see more.

I bought this game because I had some free credit just sitting in my Google Play account and decided to give this game a try since it looked interesting. The color choices and animation is pretty much what drives this game forward, and I personally found it to be beautiful with the way they put this game together. However, there is very little content that holds this game together as an actual game. This can be a good or bad thing depending on what you are looking for in a game.

The main protagonist has no name, they never say it; all you know is that the world is falling apart and he is having a very hard time dealing with it. I suppose you could call this a break up simulator — or more like a depression simulator — as you go through his daily life to wake up in the morning, drink a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, and go out for a walk in the post apocalyptic city that is slowly decaying and falling apart around him.

One of the things that I found interesting was the simple, yet effective choice for how the controls and game would play out. It is a side scrolling game and you use the bottom corners of the screen to walk either left or right, items you can interact with slightly wiggle about, and you can tap on them to start the interaction, such as, riding the elevator down from your apartment.

For certain scenes while you’re playing you will come across a ticking face clock, if you click on it it will turn back time, transforming the environment you are currently standing in to an image from the past, changing the colors from dry gloomy shades of grey and browns, to bright shades of reds and orange colors as you look back on happier times.

As the game progresses you collect these memories to piece the story together. At first glance, The End Of The World all seems to be in his head as if it was a psychological and emotional story, but as the story began to unfold and the city continued to fall apart- which sometimes would block off familiar locations that you visited in the past, I began to question if perhaps the world around him was literally falling apart.

The music is soft and dreamy for the most part and matches the atmosphere of the game, almost becoming ambient background noise to match the tone of your current surroundings. The animations for The End Of The World are quite smooth and fun to watch as you walk around the city and watch the small clips to explore the memories from his past and present day. I don’t want to spoil the game too much because the fun is in discovering and playing it for yourself, but I linked to the official trailer for The End Of The World so you can see a bit of what it is like down below.

Before I end the article, I really want to point out a few cons I came across, one of them being how short this game is. In total if you play it straight through it is about 15 to 20 minutes long, if you want to look around and explore to see if there are any hidden items or scenes, you can waste time and stretch it out to about 30 to 40 minutes; which is what I did to see if anything changed.

The interactions with how you play are far and few, so you mostly play to look at the environment and to figure out what is going on, but there isn’t any dialogue or real story, you piece the story together by collecting memories that you watch in the form of images or small animated clips, so don’t go into this expecting anything fancy like platform jumping or puzzle solving. It all revolves around a man’s life slowly falling apart and him trying to piece himself back together with the little things he has left.

Overall, I enjoyed the game for what it was and it did entertain me, but the short story and lack of gameplay left me wanting more, so I would give it a decent 3 out of 5 if I had to rate this game. If they added a bit more content to stretch the game out I would have given it one additional point for its creative art style. Perhaps add in some puzzles to unlock the memories before watching them, just to add a bit of a challenge to stretch the game out.

If you are interested in playing The End Of The World, it costs just under $2 USD and can be played on both Android and iOS operating systems. For more information you can visit the Google Play store, or the Apple iTunes store for further details.

Verdict: