Wobbly Life first presents players with a funny, down-to-earth sandbox game that aims to show what life is really like. While the genre has mostly been used to depict more criminal lifestyles, such as in the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, Wobbly Life instead encourages players to live a more honest lifestyle. At first, the premise is exactly what it says on the tin.
The first job the player picks up in the tutorial is to grab a jelly from the store and deliver it to their neighbour. Other jobs on the overworld include fishing, delivering newspapers, firefighting, and driving a taxi; the list goes on. All of them are down-to-earth, but most are stressful, especially if playing alone.
What stands out most is that some newspaper routes feel almost impossible to do alone. These jobs are a great cue for the game’s greatest strength: multiplayer. Wobbly Life’s multiplayer is surprisingly fun. While the game itself is quite simple, it leaves plenty of room for chaos by mixing realism with silliness and keeping consequences minimal. This lack of consequences lets players explore a world that can feel cruelly similar to real life, but with a level of chaos they could never get away with IRL.
It is truly satisfying to travel around with a friend or two in demolition trucks and swing those massive wrecking balls around town. Likewise, otherwise repetitive yet relaxing actions like fishing are always more pleasant when enjoyed in the company of others.
However, Wobbly Life depends too heavily on other players to feel alive. It mixes cosy-game elements with city-sandbox ideas, but its design often lacks the sense that anything matters. One common way to solve that is through NPCs the player can get to know and bond with. Sadly, Wobbly Life has barely any NPCs with noticeable dialogue and, at first, offers no direction for the player to follow. After buying their first home and getting their favourite outfit, a player might think they are done with the game, but they are not.
That said, Wobbly Life includes some NPCs to talk to, and plenty of quests that unlock new features, such as the ability to go into space and find another hub city to explore. The issue is that this isn’t clear at the start of the game and has to be discovered through further exploration. Many quests have quite obscure objectives and starting locations. One in particular has the player explore caves all around Wobbly Island. The issue is that these aren’t clearly marked on the map, so players can stumble around for hours looking for them.
While exploration is fun, ridiculously bad quest descriptions are not. Another outstanding example is a quest where the player is asked to look for a clown that never shows up to a birthday party. The problem is, there isn’t a single clown in the overworld. After what could be hours of searching, the player might finally realise the solution is to dress up as a clown themselves.
Combined with how difficult it is to stumble upon quests, players might think they have done everything there is to do after just scratching the surface, and that is quite poor game design. Understandably, some of these issues slipped past feedback during early access, when they were more likely to read update logs to find new content. However, for a fully released title, the setup simply doesn’t work well. The nuggets of content are too far apart and difficult to find.
The content that is there is fantastic at times, though. One of the best things found by accident while stumbling around for this review was an ancient ruin filled to the brim with puzzles and opportunities to explore, with worthwhile rewards to match. For a moment it felt like playing a game with a clear goal and direction.
Sadly, Wobbly Life spent too much of its early access development creating new content rather than making sure what was already there works. While things like the ruins are fun, they run counter to the original idea of a down-to-earth life simulator about a homeless wobble making their way through life. That’s about what Wobbly Life can handle, sadly. When playing the game’s former core – the jobs- and aiming to find clothes while chaotically exploring, Wobbly Life works quite well. However, when trying to do anything else, it falls as flat as the wobble when the player presses the button to make the wobble’s muscles relax all at once.
Many quests have what could have been fun platforming sections and plenty of exploration. The issue is that Wobbly Life’s controls were never made for this sort of content. Most of the time, when doing platforming or object-based puzzles, it feels more like fighting the horrid controls than the level design or the puzzle’s logic.
While this is more often than not forgivable, some parts are not. The worst issue that stems from Wobbly Life becoming an entirely different game than how it started is how poorly item despawning and water work. When a player drops something in the water, it despawns. That makes complete sense; the game even tells the player not to get into the water themselves, as wobbles can’t swim. Given their rubbery properties, one might assume it’s because they ate a certain fruit. That sounds fine and all.
However, that is until players figure out this also happens when travelling on a boat, and the water textures leak into the bottom of the boat. This is especially bad when transporting rare artefacts to the museum or other quest-related objects. It makes no sense and can ruin hours of progress, given that many artefacts are on an island far from the museum. For the early gameplay loop of doing short jobs, it won’t matter. However, when Wobbly Life added things like a museum collection and quests, it also raised the bar of expected functionality, a bar years in early access did not raise sufficiently.
Wobbly Life is a great lesson that sometimes the boring updates are the most important ones. While new content is exciting during early access, if it’s glitchy, players won’t easily forgive it at full launch once the novelty has worn off. Wobbly Life is charming and full of content that, while good, is far too hidden. However, it lacks in many areas it overreached into during development, which hurts the experience too much.
