By: Maple Graham

‘Dandy’s World’ is a mascot horror game on Roblox, taking place in the abandoned Gardenview Educational Center and Museum. Gardenview was an attraction for children, housing real, living counterparts to their respective characters in the show. It additionally doubled as a studio for working on episodes. It closed in 2002 after 14 years of operation because of an incident regarding the living main character. The game itself takes place after this “incident,” where you play as the various characters known as “Toons” that are still stuck in the facility. Your primary goal is to complete as many floors as possible by filling up machines with ichor to power the elevator, while avoiding malevolent versions of the cast—known as “Twisteds”.

On February 27th, ‘Dandy’s World’ released a new minor update, adding a new Toon, a new area to explore, and an achievement system. This update had a lot of expectations from the community—the development team finished a recent rework of parts of the game to allow more complex things in future updates.

The new Toon, Squirm, was met with positive feedback. His character is fun to play—his ability to eat books off of nearby shelves for a machine boost is something no one expected; I hope the development team continues to make characters with unique special abilities.

Squirm’s personality, however, was controversial among fans when he released. His entire character revolves around being sad, scared, and miserable all the time—like Shrimpo, another Toon revolving around another negative emotion: anger. I think his character, while annoying, is what ‘Dandy’s World’ needs. Shrimpo being the only antagonist in the entire show was disappointing to me, and while Squirm isn’t mean compared to Shrimpo, his rollercoaster of emotions brings out scenarios previously unexplored in dialogue.

Squirm, like all other characters, has a “Twisted” version acting as an enemy to all players. His Twisted is unique and changes up gameplay when active on a floor—hanging down from the ceiling and dropping down to grab any players that make the mistake of coming too close. This is particularly harmful to “distractors,” a role tasked to lead enemies away from other teammates so they can work on powering the elevator without issue. Distractors are common within experienced teams, so a new strategy to deal with Squirm will be necessary.

In ‘Dandy’s World’, there’s 4 rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Main Character. Squirm’s major flaw (which isn’t even the Toon’s fault) is his rarity—being a Rare Toon. The rarity system in ‘Dandy’s World’ is far from perfect, and Squirm’s existence is detrimental to his rarity tier. Players need to encounter Twisted Squirm to get research on him to unlock his playable Toon variant and his Trinket (Trinkets are unique equippable items that give you different perks).

The game determines how rare a Twisted is through a list system, with each rarity weighted differently. This system works like a deck of cards; every rarity has a set number of cards in that deck: 75 Common cards, 25 Uncommon cards, and 8 Rare cards. For each Twisted to spawn on the floor, a random “card” is drawn, and a random enemy is then spawned from the card’s respective rarity. Main Character cards throw this system into a loop—every 5 floors, 4 Main cards are added to this hypothetical deck, with every other rarity not scaling with the Main Characters.

For example, when starting the game, there’s a 7.41% chance that when an enemy spawns, it will be Rare. Once you get to the 5th floor, this chance decreases to 7.14% because Main Characters are now in the “deck”. At the 10th floor, Main Characters are now as common as Rare enemies (both being 6.9% with every enemy spawned). This trend continues, with the Main Characters later becoming the most common enemy; even more ubiquitous than Common Toons themselves!

And the chances mentioned above are only for rarities. After that, each character in the rarity tier has an equal chance of being chosen. In Squirm’s case, he is 1 of 7 Rare characters. That means the 7.14% chance on floors 1-4 doesn’t represent his true spawn rate in an accurate way; he has a 1.06% chance of spawning as an enemy then! This percentage nosedives into chances less than 1% starting on floor 5—making his encounter excessively rare.

Having the additional information that Twisted Squirm must be encountered to acquire his character and trinket, and that he’s part of the rarest group in the entire game, you can see how the community was annoyed. This problem showed itself before, during the Halloween and Christmas events, where limited-time characters were added to the rarity pools, indirectly making all characters rarer for the duration of the event. Eclipse and Coal, the two Rare characters in each event, were notoriously hard to find. Parallel to Squirm, many said the only challenge to getting the Rare event Toons was luck itself.

What differed from the event updates compared to now is the misinformation. I have seen conglomerations of fans saying that Rare Toons (specifically a Toon named Blot) were removed from the game via a “glitch.” This is not true—I have talked with many people who have all encountered him during the newest update, and the developer team itself has not claimed this is true. The only reason why people may think this way is because all Rare Toons have a 1.06% chance of spawning at most, giving the illusion to casual players that some Twisteds may never show up.

The development team addressed this on March 5th with their Easter event teaser, stating that they completely changed how rarities work and gave a short table of percentages from a sample of early floors. This system is far from simple; I tried extrapolating data to get a general understanding of how it works, but I could find little correlation between data points. One thing I could predict with certainty was that Rare toons will have an extra added weight of 2 (2 more cards, if you’re still following the example from earlier), raising their starting chances from 7.41% to 9.09% in the new update!

Overall, Squirm’s addition was a net positive, but the surrounding hype was dampened partly from his dislikable personality and from his initial Twisted rarity at the time of the update.

The new area, the library, is a new map that can be randomly encountered from the start of the game. It has a center with shelves rotated every which way to create asymmetrical, tight spaces to navigate—and outer areas that are more open and predictable. This map is tied to Squirm through various bits of lore throughout the floor, and also meshes well with the rest of the characters. From what I have seen, most people enjoy the map and have no qualms with it.

The community was additionally surprised with a rework of another area, the gift shop. Whereas the library was received positively, this rework came across as unnecessary to many. Not only did it change the shop’s entire layout, it also made the entire area much more spacious; the area was already spacious enough to many. Personally, I like the reworked gift shop, but removing the old gift shop was a bad idea. The rework would work better as a variant of the gift shop—more variants of newer maps are needed for variety.

Finally, the developers added an achievement system as a smaller part to a new menu, the journal. The journal sets up future updates with a few locked sections, such as a dialogue viewer, and other collectible menus. The achievements are a welcome addition to the game, with 25+ different challenges for players to beat! They hit the mark with optional achievements, such as beating a challenge floor with the weakest character in the game, to getting chased by 6 enemies at once. There are also plenty of benchmark achievements that players can get through normal gameplay.

While most of the achievements are wonderful, the ranking system that goes along with it is so unbelievably unbalanced. For example, according to the game, it is harder to complete a floor under 1 minute than getting to floor 50—getting to just floor 20 has been widely considered being a difficult task by the community even before the update, while completing a floor in under 1 minute is easily attainable during the beginning of runs if you have at least 4 people.

A floor 100 achievement was also added, with that being the most debated addition the update brought. Only a select few people have ever gotten to floor 100, and the people that did it spent hours, even days on a single run. Some think the removal of the achievement would benefit the game, while others think an optional challenge that doesn’t affect gameplay isn’t that bad.

In summary, the new ‘Dandy’s World’ update was taken well, with the community enjoying the grand majority of it. I’ve been working on catching up with getting everything in the game, and while the new achievements are quite an obstacle, I’m not discouraged in the slightest to continue playing the game.