Soulless gaming. This is about as lifeless and corporatist it gets when it comes. It’s almost incredible how tedious and bad this is, like I don’t think I really understood until I realized that I was only two hours into the game after what felt like six hours. Definitely up there as one of the dullest games I’ve played in a long time. How do you even fuck up a superhero game this poorly, it’s almost impressive honestly. Either way, if I play another hour of this game I may get physically ill so I’m done with it, sunken cost theory be damned. Fuck off Crystal Dynamics.

This game is like, peak kusoge. There are so many systems in this game, so much ambition, and all of it is terrible. Made at the peak of the Havok Physics Engine revolution of the 360 generation, everything in this game flops around and waggles. A horror game that completely fails to be scary at any point, it is a genuinely hilarious romp to go through right up until the final Episode of the game, where the game demands you arbitrarily burn down 50 tree roots before you're allowed to do the final chapter.

"I Don't Have Your Stone, and Fuck You Anyway" - Edward Carnby

Guys we’re okay now, Yuji Naka’s been arrested he can’t hurt us anymore

On October 30th, I broke my right arm. Doing this, unsurprisingly, left me with very few options for games for the first couple days, which was clearly the worst part as it left me considering playing Balan Wonderworld. My singular praise of the gameplay comes from that fact. Great job Balan Wonderworld, for being a game that people with an unusable hand can play. Unfortunately that’s also where a majority of this game's issues originate from. Everyone else has covered that already though, and honestly I’d much rather talk about other things. Said other things are really almost everything else, because in all honesty? I really like a lot about this game. The cutscenes are all so adorable, the game looks beautiful, the little dance numbers after every boss fight are really cute, the character and costume designs are great, everything about this game aside the game itself really is truly wonderful! Just a little experience I had were with the couple of ending cutscenes, which very surprisingly had me tearing up a bit, and really had me thinking “Y’know, maybe this was worth it.” I can only wish that actually was the case.

This isn’t even remotely as morbid a failure as it’s being made out to be (imo this is far from being the worst platformer of the year, let alone of all time), and they clearly responded to what criticism about the demo they could in the small window of time they had, but this is still a very disappointing release from someone of Yuji Naka’s pedigree. There are some real easily corrected choices here that totally perplex me: why do you need a key to unlock the costume pickups when these keys are, without fail, placed directly next to the box pickups and mindlessly accessible? Why are Balan’s Bouts dreary, maliciously unforgiving QTE sequences instead of cute little rhythm games that would enhance the game’s theatrical motifs? Why do you have to “stock” costumes instead of just being able to swap to them once encountered? Like almost everybody, I have LOTS of problems with the game, but it feels a little cruel and incurious to see people hammer so hard on BW for not being this conventionally engaging mechanically tight platformer (none of Yuji Naka’s games really are lol) when to me it seems like Balan’s priorities… clearly aren’t to be that? I agree that the game fails on its potential in a myriad of frustrating ways, but I’d much rather discuss those briefly glimmering unique elements that could have been pushed further rather than rail on it for feeling “dated” while simultaneously condemning it for not being kinesthetically identical to a legacy platformer series that’s pushing 40.

I think, ideally, the game’s one-button input philosophy and limited level design are intended to create a hyper-accessible fanciful spree of cutesy quick changing aesthetics and encouragement--a sugary character randomizer musically shifting between different flavors of low-stakes whimsy--and thats a vibe outline I can definitely see merit in. Sometimes this almost kind of works: a lot of the costumes are goofy and adorable! It’s genuinely kind of fun to get a new suit and wonder what it can do! There are a few rare moments where the level design and powers are in great harmony and the whacko dancing npcs appear and seem to be cheering just 4 u--u go girl!!! Unfortunately, the levels and costumes rarely feel as exuberant and symbiotic as they should to make something like this work, and the game REALLY underestimated just how meaningful any ability that overwrites your jump function needs to be in order to not feel completely disempowering. It can feel patronizing and dull, but it’s absolutely not some utter atrocity of design; The game is internally consistent and it functions coherently within its own parameters, despite them being pretty mystifying and insipid at times--it’s not some Sonic 06 level technical failure in any regard. I was let down by the mechanics, sure, but my real problem is that the game is rarely as bold and engaging an aesthetic experience as something like Nights or Chu Chu Rocket. However, there are still some bits of genuinely quirky individuality I really enjoyed.

The musical theater aesthetic is a totally bonkers camp delight. Some of the scenarios leading to these redemptive dance numbers are hysterical and charming (I particularly love “girl and her dolphin friend had a falling out (???) and need to reconcile”) Seeing the motion-captured choreo kind of poorly translated onto all these wonky deviantart original character costumes has a synthetic but silly sort of jankiness that fully circled back into an earnest and endearing place for me. The cutscenes are genuinely lovely, and the craftworld sort of cgi stuff they do is great. I kind of love the enigmatic stupidity of the Tower O’ Tims and its ever-expanding marshmallow peep Rube Goldberg device that appears to do nothing but exist for its own sake--I couldnt help but laugh when I spent 10 minutes watching the dumb little critters revolve around in their weird merry go round in order to unlock a third “tim trampoline” i literally never saw any of them use. The soundtrack is unequivocally pretty excellent, although it definitely feels a bit slight on tracks.

I have to wonder what a kid playing this would feel like, someone with a looser outlook about what the genre should do, someone with a less claustrophobic understanding of competence/quality than me--someone who can play games and not even compartmentalize them into genre expectations at all! I’m not even sure those kids exist or would care about this game, but the kind of frustrating letdown experience of Balan was still memorable to me despite itself, and playing it had me thinking about my own processing and approaches to design when playing games. And hey, my partner and I have been swinging our little terrier around and belting the game’s wannabe Idina Menzel gibberish anthems to her for the past week so that’s gotta be worth something right!!!