Playing Rain Games' World to the West feels like listening to a familiar song, sung with a new voice. Or rather four new voices, as each of the game's four playable characters adds their own personality into the mix. While you can still hear the old familiar tune underneath it all, it is well worth listening to.

Or, to put it another way, World to the West may be riffing off of the Zelda games and similar top-down action adventures, and yet it doesn't feel derivative at all. If anything, it adds to the genre by splitting up different gameplay mechanics, making each of its four unlikely heroes play noticeably different. Oh, and the game's light-hearted cartoony style will probably charm your fake mustache off, so there's that.

Sharing the same universe with Rain Games' previous title, Teslagrad, World to the West follows four different characters whose fates appear to be intertwined. Teslamancer Lumina can control electricity and zip around fast as lightning. Knaus the orphan escapes a weird underground labor camp by digging lots of holes with his trusty shovel. Miss Teri can mind-control other creatures and bridge gaps with her shawl. And finally, the wonderfully pompous pugilist Lord Clonington likes to solve problems with his head... as in "head-first into the next wall."
Each one of these four protagonists plays differently, and thus you get to traverse the world in various ways. Most of the time, this doesn't necessarily involve combat. Consider...