A Better World

Your new job: rewriting history, within company policy

A Better World is developer Ludogram's satirical narrative game, published by ARTE France and released 17 November 2025 for Windows and macOS. The setup casts players as a new recruit at the titular corporation, using a powerful time-travelling Computer to intervene at pivotal historical moments, stopping JFK's assassination, handing nuclear technology to Gandhi, redirecting the Space Race toward Mars instead of the Moon, all while officially working to build "a better world" and unofficially discovering just how messy the consequences of good intentions can get. Structurally, the game plays out as a series of self-contained missions, each built around exploring a historical event, making a defining choice, and then watching, and analyzing, how that choice ripples forward through the following decades.

A premise reviewers enjoy, even when the execution frustrates

A meaningful portion of A Better World's review corpus responds warmly to the strength of its core idea. Reviewers repeatedly and specifically praise the fun of exploring different historical branches and absurd butterfly-effect outcomes, with one detailed review describing genuine engagement "from beginning to end" and specifically crediting the writing for landing real laughs across its runtime. The game's presentation earns its own credit, with reviewers describing a polished, distinctive control-room aesthetic, one detailed review comparing it directly to a well-known time-travel bureaucracy familiar from television, while several reviewers note the game's short length, roughly two and a half hours for a full playthrough according to one detailed account, works in its favour at its modest asking price. A notable, specific point of praise concerns the developers' handling of feedback during the game's pre-release demo: multiple reviewers note that AI-generated voice narration present in an earlier festival build was removed before launch after drawing criticism, replaced with a more conventional text-based delivery that reviewers describe as a clear improvement.

History reviewers say the writers didn't do their homework on

Set against that goodwill, the single most dominant and heavily repeated complaint across A Better World's review corpus concerns its command of the history it sets out to rewrite. Multiple detailed reviews describe a superficial or outright flawed understanding of historical and geopolitical context, with one widely-read review arguing the game "retreads history with superficial changes...instead of committing to a meaningful alternate universe," citing implausible plot turns like the internet appearing decades early with little else in the world changing as a result. Specific factual errors compound that criticism for some reviewers: one detailed review points to the game identifying Marie Skłodowska-Curie, the Polish-French physicist and chemist, simply as "French," calling it emblematic of writing that reviewer says "feels like it was written by high schoolers." That combination of criticisms leads a meaningful share of the corpus to frame the game as closer to a shallow parody of serious alternate-history fiction than the thoughtful satire its premise promises.

Shallow branches, soft-locks, and a game some reviewers call abandoned

A further, independently repeated complaint concerns how choices actually function across the game's structure. Multiple reviewers note that branching only occurs within individual missions rather than carrying forward meaningfully into the broader story, with one detailed review describing the result as feeling "a bit hollow" despite otherwise solid writing, and another directly comparing the game unfavourably to an earlier version, referred to in one review as "ABW Blue," which set expectations the finished release doesn't fully meet. A specific, pointed complaint concerns unresolved technical issues: one detailed review reports specific endings and paths becoming permanently unobtainable due to soft-locks that, as of that review, remained unaddressed, describing the game as having "seemingly been abandoned by the developers immediately after launch." A related, smaller but repeated complaint concerns interface friction, with reviewers describing unnecessary, constant switching between a central console and a companion character, and the absence of any undo function meaning a single wrong decision can force replaying an entire mission from its start.

A Lille studio's second game, delayed a year past its original target

A Better World arrives from Ludogram, a roughly thirty-person studio based in Lille, France, founded in 2019 around the goal of pairing game designers with creators from other narrative backgrounds. The studio's first release, Firebird, a narrative road trip set in Siberia developed with game designer FibreTigre and illustrator Quentin Vijoux, established a template of collaborating with outside writers on story-driven, choice-based games that A Better World follows directly, this time developed alongside publisher ARTE France around a premise its own marketing has compared to a mashup of Loki and The Stanley Parable. The game was originally announced for a release at the end of 2024, meaning its finished November 2025 launch arrived roughly a year later than first planned, a gap that may help explain why reviewers who followed the project's earlier demo builds, including the version that shipped with AI-generated narration later removed, describe a title whose core concept feels more thoroughly workshopped than its underlying historical writing does. That mismatch, a premise and presentation reviewers describe as confident and polished set against historical content several call underdeveloped, recurs often enough across the corpus to suggest the extra development time went disproportionately toward the game's mechanical and visual systems rather than the historical research its central conceit depends on.

Value

At NZ$17.49, A Better World asks a modest price for a short, narrative-focused satirical game, and its Mixed reception, 42 positive against 20 negative across 62 reviews, reflects a review base genuinely split between players charmed by its premise, writing and presentation, and a substantial group frustrated by historical carelessness, shallow mission-to-mission branching, and reports of unaddressed launch bugs. For fans of short, choice-driven narrative games who can treat the game's history as satirical shorthand rather than a serious alternate-timeline exercise, A Better World is worth a look, particularly at a discount; for players hoping for meaningfully consequential choices or a more careful treatment of the historical events it plays with, the current review corpus suggests tempering expectations first.