It’s a hundred years into the future. Humanity’s last hope rests on a girl. No, the Girl. As the Commissioner, you were tasked by the Council to advise her, tutor her, and maintain the facade of the elaborate, artificial city around her. Raise her correctly, so she can save the world. There is no room for failure.
At its best, The World According to Girl strikes a nerve somewhere between an insular Truman Show, slice-of-life manga panels, and an inversion of Ursula K. Le Guin’s haunting short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. But even by the standards of other stat-raising games, The World According to Girl can’t quite decide what it wants to be: a number-munching power fantasy, or a dreamlike moral conflict?
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Upper Management
The World According to Girl is billed as a roguelike deck-builder first and foremost, and a life simulation second. Gameplay is split into three rough phases: scheduling, tutoring, and a yearly exam. Every season (there are six in total), you allocate the Girl’s schedule throughout the city, using a set number of points to boost each district’s effects on her stats: Intelligence, Vitality, Kindness, and Charm.
Points can also be siloed into conducting surveys, which obtain potentially rare personnel, and upgrading the city as a whole. Personnel are your “deck,” so to speak. Each member has their stats added to the district they work in, adding to the Girl’s bonuses after a visit. Some have effects when you pick them up, and others after a certain number of turns pass. Staff can also send well-wishes to the Girl in other areas of the game, providing semi-randomized boosts for an exam turn.
I relished each chance to grab new personnel because that meant another bit of delicious flavor text and beautifully stylized character art.
In-between each season, you, as the Commissioner, can choose what to teach the Girl during tutoring sessions, fielding semi-randomized questions. I know it’s semi-randomized because I had to deflect the same awkward wish-fulfillment “What’s your type?” at least three times during my short initial playthrough. These answers contribute to her stat growth in a small but consistent way.
Stress Test
Each year concludes in the Abigail Exams. Four judges oversee the exam, one for each stat group. To pass the exam, you have to meet or surpass at least two of the judges’ point thresholds. Fail these thresholds, as I did in the Girl’s second year, and you get one chance to redo. Fail again and your current playthrough fully ends.
The Girl answers their questions using her memories. Meeting certain conditions throughout the season or activating district bonuses a certain number of times will grant the girl MP, or Memory Points. Before each exam, you can concentrate these points into memories. The more MP you put into a memory, the stronger the attribute.
The memory mechanic isn’t foregrounded nearly enough. The text-heavy tutorial mentions using memories, but largely leaves the option buried in a side menu. The conditions to gain Memory Points are also hidden; you only discover any MP gain after scheduling a season.
As I found out through trial and error, these are the difference between stress and failure during the Girl’s exams. And exam difficulty increases exponentially from year to year, only revealing the target point values immediately before each Abigail Test.
Control Room
The World According to Girl’s early stages re-calibrated my expectations, and not always for the better. The life simulation aspects suffer in favor of the stat-driven deck-building side. Given the gravity of the situation, the Girl doesn’t get many choices of her own.
Even in security footage encounters with city personnel, the Commissioner gets to choose the Girl’s response. She still managed to delight me during narrative segments, poking the Commissioner with constant questions and insisting on burgers and orange jam.
But seasoned players of Long Live the Queen and other genre mainstays will notice the absence of hair-raising life events that test accumulated stats. So far, there are no true tests of the Girl’s mettle, only slice-of-life antics. Hopefully the Girl will act more on her own as years pass.
Character art—or lack thereof—adds to my ambivalence. The Girl, the Commissioner, and recruitable personnel get delightful character art, but the Girl’s stand-in mother remains a silhouette. Even in full cutscenes, she remains indistinct, despite being just as involved in the Girl’s day-to-day life.
Thoughts So Far: It’s All Up to Her
The World According to Girl shies away from traditional hallmarks of the raising genre. It attempts to shed the fantasy trappings of mainstay Princess Maker and the eldritch undercurrents of GameChanger Studio’s “My Lovely” series.
And when the dreamy, ambivalent tone hits, it really hits. The moments out of my control—narrative sequences, unintended consequences of past actions, the short news snippets and stories on interstitials—kept me going through the number-crunching.
In the end, it’ll depend on how the World According to Girl chooses to land. Will the Girl truly grow, or merely reflect the stats and values the Commissioner imposed on her? Will the game wrest more control away with time, or settle into the familiar rhythm of its contemporaries? For better or worse, it’s all up to the Girl.
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