You've been transported magically to a tiny world (eight feet in diameter) which has stopped spinning, so your brief is to get things moving again. Along the way you encounter a miniature Adam and Eve, nuclear war, interplanetary conflicts of various sorts, and other problems of various seriousness. The most memorable aspect of the world is the devil that tags along behind you on a pogo stick making snarky comments about most events in the game; as a parody of Satan (in reference to heaven, "Is that powderpuff really where you want to go when you die?") or as general comic relief ("A miserably whistled rendition of 'Can't Get No Satisfaction' assures you the devil is right behind"), the devil is one of the game's main assets.

The game itself has become somewhat more user-friendly in recent releases--the competition release made inventory management somewhat excessively cumbersome for the sake of realism. (The cleanup makes sense--insisting on realism in the story of an eight-foot-in-diameter world was probably overkill.) Still, owing to the nature of the beast, it's not an easy game; when so much of what goes on is dependent on whimsy, it can be difficult to tune into the author's brand of whimsy in order to get the puzzles solved. Some of the non-user-friendly aspects are still there, in fact--the game can close off without warning early on if you do certain things out of order. Nor is there an overarching logic to the game that the player needs to acclimate to, really--there's no theme or motif that explains the puzzles. They're not bad puzzles, but they're not particularly accessible, either--and the last one, which effectively plays games with the syntax and is rather difficult to visualize, is even more challenging. There's a hint system; it doesn't adapt perfectly to your situation, but it works well enough.

What's interesting about Small World is that it doesn't appear to take itself seriously, and yet the conflicts on the world you inhabit are rendered as actual conflicts rather than as humor. That is, even though the devil appears to be mostly there for fun, you do have to get rid of him, and at a key moment you get the devil rooting against you (and various heavenly choirs rooting for you). When you finally succeed, the devil gives "a great despairing wail, taken up by all his followers, combining the sounds of howling wolves, screeching canaries, hissing snakes, yammering jackhammers," which eventually "trails off to a hollow, echoing moan, then silence." A little heavy for a comedy game, as are the various nuclear warheads hurled at you (you're given a thousand-turn countdown until the inhabitants run out of missiles). In its own way, though, the comic/serious duality works--after all, your role is, in a sense, to play God/savior for the miniature world, and you get a sense of both the comic absurdity and the tragedy of such a role. That is, your perspective permits you to laugh at the world you're charged with saving, but the inhabitants can be forgiven for not seeing the humor in it all. The quality of the writing helps here: generally, when the game's being funny, it does so through understatement, without appearing to try too hard, so shifting into a less whimsical mode doesn't feel like a jolt.

Small World is uneven in a few respects, but it's none the less enjoyable for that, and the most recent releases have improved its production values.