Reading someone else’s letters carries a specific kind of guilt, the sense that you’re not supposed to be seeing this, even as you keep reading anyway. WILL: A Wonderful World takes that voyeurism a step further, handing you the letters and then letting you rearrange what’s actually written inside them.
An urban legend claims that writing your troubles down and praying to a god will get them answered. Myth wakes with no memory of who she is inside a house where it never stops snowing, greeted by a talking dog named Will, sometimes called Willy, who explains that the two of them are the gods behind that same legend. He chose a dog’s shape specifically, rather than the human form his own personality was originally based on, so Myth wouldn’t have to carry the weight of certain truths about either of them before she’s ready to. Letters start arriving soon after, each one written by a stranger asking for their fate to change, and it becomes Myth and Will’s job to decide how, and how much, to help.
The mechanic underneath that premise is the real hook. You’re never simply choosing an outcome on a character’s behalf. Instead, you take specific sentences from two different people’s letters and physically swap them between the two stories, reordering the sequence of someone’s actions. You can transplant a pivotal event from one person’s life directly into another’s, or otherwise rewrite the plain, objective facts of what happened to them. Each situation opens up multiple distinct endings, drawn from what can amount to hundreds or even thousands of possible sentence combinations depending on the letter.
WMY Studio developed this in China, releasing the original Chinese version on Steam before Sekai Project brought an English localization to the same platform, priced at $14.99. Circle Entertainment and Numskull Games handled a Nintendo Switch port that followed on October 18, 2018, with a PlayStation 4 version arriving the following July. The Switch release adds its own touches on top of the base game. An in-house achievement system stands in for the platform’s lack of a trophy system. A Dictionary section collects vocabulary and setting terms encountered across the story, several of them illustrated, including one entry built around a small plush version of a character nicknamed Ser Spotty.
The letter-writers span cities across China and Korea, each carrying a distinct crisis and cultural backdrop. Li Wen, a high school senior, finds her story quietly intertwined with Wen Zhaoren, a disillusioned art teacher who has spent a full decade unable to create anything after some earlier loss dried up his inspiration completely. Jimmy channels real hacking talent into something considerably less healthy, an obsessive fixation on someone he has no real claim to that the story never lets off the hook just because he’s otherwise sympathetic. Spottie carries a streetwise edge that plays differently against Carlos, Alicia, Chang Gyeong-Min, and Kang Baek-Ya, each of whom gets pulled into the same web of letters from their own separate corner of the world. Park Sang-Gun’s own letters open on him as a child already coping with a father’s drinking, and I’ll leave exactly where that thread eventually goes for you to find out rather than spell out here.
Myth’s own arc runs alongside theirs, a god discovering who she actually is one letter at a time, with Will as her only steady companion through it. No single mortal’s story pulled me in as much as watching Myth wrestle with what helping someone even means, once she realizes a happy outcome for one person can come at real cost to someone else entirely.
Tone shifts hard as the story moves forward, starting close to whimsical before sliding into real difficulty. The game’s own content carries real weight behind its Mature rating, touching on things like abusive households without flinching away from them. What keeps that weight from becoming bleak for its own sake is how the writing treats even its characters’ worst moments as something worth the effort of trying to change, rather than material to sit in for shock value.
The sentence-rearranging system rewards real experimentation once you settle into it, since the outcome that reads as happiest on the surface isn’t always the one the story actually treats as best for a given character. Chasing down every possible ending across the whole cast asks for real patience given how deep the combination space runs on some of the letters, but that density is exactly what makes replaying individual stories worth doing instead of feeling like padding. A full playthrough covering most of what the game has to offer runs somewhere between twenty and twenty five hours depending on how much of that replaying you actually chase.
Roughly forty individual music tracks carry the experience, each one tied closely enough to its specific scene that I never caught the score repeating itself in a way that broke the mood. I could not attribute the score to a specific composer despite looking. Character art comes from more than one artist across the project. That split shows in a handful of CGs that carry a slightly different style from the rest of the cast, though the strongest individual illustrations still carry real weight regardless of which hand drew them. Nothing here is spoken aloud, which fits how heavily the experience leans on text and letters rather than performed dialogue.
The English localization, put together with Sekai Project’s help, reads cleanly throughout, without the kind of grammatical stumbles that sometimes plague smaller international releases translated on a limited budget. A separate soundtrack and art book are both sold on Steam packaged together with the base game as a bundle, giving anyone who finishes the story something more to hold onto afterward.
Verdict
WILL: A Wonderful World succeeds through a mechanic that actually changes how you think about cause and effect, letting you rewrite the raw facts of someone’s story instead of just picking a branch of it. The tonal swing from whimsical premise to real, heavy subject matter won’t sit right with everyone, but for anyone willing to follow it there, this is one of the more inventive and quietly moving pieces of interactive fiction in the genre.
