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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
