BALAN WONDERWORLD

It's a one of a kind experience, as in I'm never playing this game ever again after finishing it

It's beautiful. The schizophrenia feature is amazing, as soon as I approach any living creature they just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ disappear. The hell? Why is the farmer majestically descending down from the heavens? 10/10 game.

I desire Balan carnally and want to wonder his little world, but if I give this game a bad review it feels like I'm picking on the handicapped

Balan Wonderworld is exactly what I expected. I didn’t think it would be good –rarely do you hear such unanimous criticism– but I was curious to see whether it was exceptionally bad or just a normal, though underwhelming, experience. And unsurprisingly, it turned out to be the former, just as so many people have already warned. Balan is in a weird position, suffering from the exact opposite problem of most other poorly reviewed games. The execution of everything is actually fine and several elements, namely the art and music, are quite good. Where it fails is that its core gameplay is completely hollow on both a conceptual and practical level. This genuinely feels like some sort of tech demo where everything except the bare necessities was trimmed away so that the underlying system could flow as smoothly as possible, except you’re normally supposed to build up from that foundation until it becomes interesting. Balan instead thought that this was sufficient to be an entire game, creating an experience that seems explicitly designed to be as simple and unengaging as possible. —------------------------------------------------- The core gimmick of this game is its costume system. As a platformer collectathon, you would normally expect a game like this to have a wide array of movement options so that you can collect items in a variety of ways. With no costume equipped, you can walk and you can jump. That’s literally it. The two don't even synergize at all –there are no special jumps depending on your speed, angle, or location– nor any other change to the mechanics based on context. You just walk at a single speed and make regular jumps. And thus, Balan makes it pretty clear that you have to use the costumes if you want to make any progress. Having such a low baseline could theoretically work if the costumes were interesting and implemented well, but Balan goes even further to make them as uninteresting as possible. There are several dozen costumes throughout the game which you can unlock, each one adding a new ability to your repertoire. Except the vast majority of these costumes are either so contextual as to be useless in any situation other than the exact ones they were designed for (such as the spider costume that lets you climb up spiderwebs) or are reskins of earlier costumes with changes so minor that they amount to barely more than a texture swap. But once you finally equip a costume, it becomes clear just how simple of a game Balan is. Instead of adding a new ability to your default movement options, equipping a costume replaces your jump. Most of the time this isn’t a huge deal as the costume is a variant on the jump anyway, but you’ll often have costumes that lack a jump entirely and thus you need to lose the costume by intentionally taking damage if there’s so much as a single ledge you want to climb up. While you can hold a limited number of costumes in your inventory and swap to them as needed, there is a one-to-two second transition so you can’t swap mid-platforming, nor can you equip multiple costumes at once. Despite multiple buttons being unused, Balan instead decides to link every button to the same action (either jump or use the costume ability) so you will never encounter any situation in which you need to use multiple costumes in conjunction with one another. This all leads to some of the most basic and simple platforming I’ve ever seen in a game. I didn’t die a single time and rarely faced any difficulty trying to navigate and collect enough items to progress. Most areas have only a single path from beginning to end with a few offshoots where you can get a collectible and each level is built around the costumes you find inside of it. This is all done in a way where the only barrier to progress is whether you have the costume equipped that the game gave you 10 seconds earlier. If you have it, progression is easy. If you don’t, progression is impossible until you get it. You might be walking down the path, encounter a big breakable block, and then you destroy it with the big block-breaking costume which then has no further use (in fact there are multiple costumes whose sole purpose is to break specific types of blocks, none of which can break the blocks associated with the other block breaking costumes for some reason). There are perhaps 5 to 10 costumes in the entire game that feel as if they’re of any general use instead of being 1:1 fits for a specific obstacle and most of these aren’t available until the final few levels. —--------------------------------------------- Despite how minimal everything in the game is, Balan still manages to feel bloated by virtue of how much its limited content is repeated throughout the game. We have all the repeated costumes as mentioned before, but even specific collectibles are repeats too. Each level will have one or more Balan’s Bouts, essentially a series of quick time events that rewards you if you do it perfectly. Each one is a minute or two in length and there are 1-2 in each level. But despite just how many there are, they all draw from the same narrow pool of animations where you watch Balan fly around and punch things while the exact same song plays every time. I got bored of them after the third one and yet there are 48 of them in the whole game (nearly a quarter of all the statues) and not a single one was meaningfully different from the rest. Enemies are similarly basic, having so little variety that I question why they even exist. All you need to do is jump on their head or, if they’re spiky, hit them using a costume’s ability. That’s pretty much all there is to it. The boss fights are at least slightly more complicated, but they’re still quite simple. The boss will use an attack and you have to react with the specific costume meant to counter the attacks. Do that three times and then you win. Once the boss is finished you get a few more statues, then a cutscene plays where all the costumes you collected start dancing in a music video (the dances and music are all the exact same after every boss). —------------------------------------------ Balan Wonderworld is quite unique compared to the other bad games I’ve played. Typically games are bad because they tried to do something interesting but completely bungled the execution because of a lack of skill, budget, or other limiting factors. Meanwhile everything in Balan is well-made, it’s just that there is so little to the experience that it feels like you’re playing the hollow shell of a game before they added any of the mechanics that were supposed to make it good. Yet rather than being an unfortunate limitation, this is apparently how the game was envisioned in the first place because of a desire to make it so accessible that it could be universally enjoyed. And in doing so, Balan Wonderworld ended up being universally mocked and soon forgotten because there’s genuinely nothing here that can justify playing it compared to any other platformer on the market. Don’t bother playing Balan Wonderworld. The game is so fundamentally devoid of content that it’s not worth engaging with. It’s not good enough to be enjoyable, nor bad enough to where its failures are interesting. This is nothing more than the hollow shell of a game where the emptiness is far more noticeable than the few things you can actually find inside. The art is pleasant and the music is occasionally good, but that’s about it. The best credit I can give the game is that it functions really smoothly, probably because there are so few mechanics that there’s little which could theoretically break in the first place. But that isn’t anywhere near enough to justify spending time and money trying to play it firsthand.

Balan Wonderworld foi uma compra movida quase exclusivamente pela teimosia. Desde a primeira vez que vi o jogo, me apaixonei pela direção de arte. Eu simplesmente adoro o visual dessa obra: as cores vibrantes, os cenários que parecem saídos de um sonho e toda aquela estética que transmite uma sensação de fantasia infantil. Talvez por isso eu tenha ignorado boa parte das críticas negativas. Afinal, um jogo tão bonito não poderia ser tão ruim assim, certo? Bem... poderia. Sei que trinta minutos não são suficientes para julgar completamente um jogo. Muitas vezes uma experiência demora para mostrar suas melhores qualidades. Ainda assim, eu não queria correr o risco de ultrapassar o limite de reembolso da Steam e acabar presa a algo que claramente não estava funcionando para mim. Bastou jogar a primeira fase para perceber que dificilmente minha opinião mudaria. O maior problema está na jogabilidade. Os controles passam uma sensação estranha, como se tudo fosse mais travado do que deveria. Talvez eu esteja exagerando, mas em alguns momentos me lembrou até Mineirinho Adventures. A diferença é que Mineirinho pelo menos consegue arrancar algumas risadas involuntárias graças ao caos da própria experiência. Aqui, a sensação foi apenas de frustração. É difícil entender como um projeto com uma apresentação tão caprichada chegou ao lançamento com mecânicas tão pouco satisfatórias. Os minigames também não ajudaram. Muitos deles passam uma sensação de falta de impacto, como se as ações realizadas pelo jogador não tivessem peso ou consequência. Eu me via concluindo atividades sem qualquer entusiasmo, apenas esperando que algo finalmente me conquistasse. Esse momento nunca chegou. Visualmente, porém, continuo achando o jogo encantador. Os personagens são carismáticos, os cenários são fofos e existe uma criatividade genuína na direção artística. Infelizmente, a beleza não consegue carregar sozinha uma experiência interativa. Em um jogo, admirar o cenário por alguns minutos não compensa uma jogabilidade que não diverte. Outro detalhe que me incomodou foi a decisão de reiniciar a fase inteira após a morte da personagem. Entendo que muitos jogos antigos funcionavam dessa forma, mas aqui a escolha parece deslocada. Em vez de aumentar o desafio ou a tensão, ela apenas interrompe o ritmo e adiciona uma frustração desnecessária. O mais curioso é que já joguei títulos objetivamente piores e, ainda assim, continuei até o final sem pedir reembolso. Com Balan Wonderworld aconteceu algo inédito para mim: não senti vontade de insistir. Em menos de uma hora, toda a curiosidade que eu tinha foi substituída pela certeza de que aquela experiência simplesmente não era para mim. No fim, fiquei com a impressão de que Balan Wonderworld é um jogo que funciona melhor em imagens e trailers do que nas mãos do jogador. Eu continuo adorando sua direção de arte e gostaria muito de ter gostado do restante, mas, desta vez, nem toda a beleza do mundo foi suficiente para me convencer a ficar.

only buy this if you wanna have a good laugh with your friends or if you genuinely hate yourself

Balan Wonderworld is one of the most mind-numbing and boring experiences I've had playing a game. The music is certainly the only highlight of the game, but it's not really worth mentioning when everything else is incomprehensibly awful. I feel bad for the developers who were tasked to work on this project when it was clearly going nowhere but the gutter.

[h1] I played Balan Wonderland in 2026 so you don't have to [/h1] [hr][/hr] This generational fumble should be studied under a macroscope, because it had the pinnacle of potential to be an amazing platformer. It's almost as if it was set up for success with a GOATed lineup behind it, but only for it miss so far from the mark that it's astounding how things came to be. [h3] Firstly, compliments to the chef. [/h3] The art in Balan Wonderland is amazing. Not just the great artworks, but the music and designs of characters too. The cutscenes have great animation made by Visual Works. [h3] Secondly, the game sucks. [/h3] I'm not gonna sugercoat it, the game itself just sucks. While I don't hate the one button controller scheme as much as others probably do, I don't love it. Most of the 80 costumes are just gimmicks for one single level, chapter, or special interaction. Out of all costumes, I don't think they were prepared for how most of the game can just be trivialized by Air Cat, but that kind of sums of a lot of the game: trivial. While I had some "aha!" moments when I finally found the costume to get a Balan Statue in an earlier chapter, they were not a common occurence. The whole system of finding a key to unlock a costume is pointless when the key is only a meter to the left of it. You can barely call this game a "puzzle game" when most of the answer is the super convenient costume. Balan Bouts were fun at first, but when the last 4 chapters have you doing 3 of them in one act with 6 inputs you have to do? I felt my brain turn to mush. Boss fights can go so fast because of how easy they are. Some acts fly by while some are a complete slog. [i]Chapter 10 felt so unbelievably rushed.[/i] [h3] Closing off, [/h3] I want to like the game because of all the positives that I have found in it by playing it for myself, but there is so much stuff that makes me think of all the lost potential it had. In my most humble opinion, if they had the chance, and made a Balan Wonderworld 2 after what they must have learned by releasing this mess, it could very well be a top tier platformer, but until then this is what we have. If I had to recommend a good 3D platformer, A Hat in Time instantly comes to mind. Amazing game throughout, and a very much worthwhile game to play. [u]Shoutouts to my boy Skauen for gifting me this wonderful game[/u] [b]Tornado Wolf will always be my GOAT[/b]

I upped my gamerscore with this one.