Two Worlds

2026-02-01
What do you call a game with a wealth of busted systems where you can stack any two identical weapons, armor, or spells increasing their power infinitely? A game where you create your character with the wealth of options of four hair styles and four faces to choose from and then immediately the game shows a cutscene where your character's face is replaced by a face that makes Steve Buscemi look like Jon Hamm. And out of that face comes the most taciturn, monotone, bottom-tier voice acting you've ever heard. A man who every time he enters a dungeon says "Hmm lovely place", every time he sees an ogre says "Hmm nice company", and every time he sees a pack of wolves says "Ahh bandits". You call that game jank. And if it's good jank I call that game amazing.

Yes, if we want to overly simplify things, Two Worlds is just a busted ass Oblivion. Oblivion after a particularly energetic bout of autoerotic asphyxiation cut off the air supply long enough to cause brain damage. It's a fantasy world borne from the mind of Lenny from Of Mice and Men. It's clumsy and dim-witted but it's also endearing. It's an easy place to spend time in but it's the jank that makes it truly compelling.

Every bit of jank can be leveraged in usually hilarious and often rewarding ways.

• Farming and infinitely stacking heal spell drops so you easily heal yourself to full with one button press.
• A combat system where enemies can be both be baited into swings you can learn to dodge and kited endlessly. Meaning you can fuck up late game enemies early on if you're good enough.
• Potions you can concoct with permanent stat increases by hoarding insane amounts of mats so that you quaff a bottle that pumps your stats by the equivalent of several levels. And like everything else you can do this infinitely if you invest the time.
• God-awful voice acting that makes you laugh as often as it makes you cringe.

It helps that the game is reasonably brutal at the start. You are constantly being ganged up on and stun-locked by dickhead bandits and dickhead orcs who spam their little "kick sand" ability so that they look like they’re trying out for the JV soccer team. You get doinked by arrows for half your health and even the wolves will cave your oddly shaped head in. So when I started to figure out these little janky backdoors I didn't feel like I was playing a shitty game that let me cheat, it felt like I figured out how to outsmart the game.

It even extends to the quest lines. At one point you need to fetch a relic and the only way to get it is to complete a series of quests for one of the two big factions in the game. Or, as I discovered, you can say “Fuck all that noise” and walk up and kill the entire camp guarding it. I actually laughed when I found the relic was locked behind an unopenable door, turned around, found the head of the faction in a nearby building, one-shotted him, went back and checked to find, yep, the door was open now. Picking up the relic I wondered if maybe the game would bug out. Obviously I shouldn't have done this, right? Nope, for as janky as the game is, and as little as it acknowledged I killed one of the most important NPCs in the game, the main quest hummed right along with my blood-soaked relic.

It's so clearly a game made by a team biting off far more than they could chew. But in shooting so high they created something truly unique. It's not Oblivion but worse. It's something different. A mutant strain with its own weird, pungent flavor. And fuck me if it's not more fun a lot of the time because of it.