Worlds Greatest Author is a hand drawn tycoon game you can buy for 8 dollars. It’s simple and it does what it sets out to do, but there isn’t really anything that makes me want to open the game ever again. It’s not a terrible game by any means, however it isn’t good either. It plays fairly similarly to an old flash tycoon game. You write books in order to make money in order to buy upgrades in order to make better books that make you more money. The process of making said books is mechanically similar to minesweeper, but instead of avoiding the mines you’re trying to find them. This is an interesting spin in theory but in practice it feels more like a scratch off ticket than a puzzle game. It’s still a pretty fun game for about 4 hours.
My biggest issue with it is it lacks scale, in the flash tycoons of yesteryear when you progressed to bigger and better you would feel it. It felt like you were really building your way up from nothing to world domination and you would see it. That doesn’t really happen here, all you get is a number that goes up and a few achievements for surpassing famous authors in history (including the developer of the game who also happens to be an author) which granted is pretty cool, but not really what I’m looking for.
One step forward one step back
The music and art style aren’t bad, but they aren’t great either – just very unremarkable. I normally wouldn’t critique a game for having lower effort aspects but everything is this way. The game excels at nothing and aims extremely low. I can’t give a game props for doing exactly what it tries to do if it didn’t try to do much.
The game’s best quality is its professionalism, if you can call that a quality. It doesn’t have any egregious bugs or major design flaws. It does just fine if you’re looking for a game to play in the background while watching something or trying to wind down, but I still can’t really recommend it under good conscience, mainly because 6 years ago this genre of game was free and maybe a little more enjoyable.
The biggest thing this game has going for it other than its mildly entertaining primary game play loop is its prestige mechanic where you go to a retreat, lose all progress and use inspiration to buy upgrades to your writing skills that are permanent. It gives the game some good progression and makes the earlier stages go a lot quicker. some of the skills you can get via the retreat are pretty cool, like certain stats stacking across runs.
Conclusion
I’d tell you to take the good with the bad but in this case there’s not really a lot of either. this game does exactly what it needs to in order to be considered a game suitable for release and very little more than that. It takes about eight hours to beat and only the first four of them are engaging, it does have theoretically infinite play time but it doesn’t really build to anything other than a bigger number. In short if you need a chill game to go with watching a movie or a stream on your own this might be the game for you, even if its not remarkable in any way i still think it could be enjoyed in that way. However if you’re looking for a game to actually occupy your time and stand on its own this game will not do it.
