For the last few years, I've taken to digging through old PS1/PS2/Dreamcast/Saturn games, including unlocalized ones, to find new tastes of what I consider the magic of video games: to step into an interesting space that plays by a unique set of rules. I delight in finding something like Napple Tale, Ape Escape 2001, or Robbit Mon Dieu that has a colorful, weird, unfamiliar world to experience. While I've often been satisfied with mere morsels of this feeling--Napple Tale's hub world, Ape Escape 2001's miniature playgrounds---Balan Wonderworld delivers a whole feast.

Every stage is surreal, varied, and bursting with color. A cornfield bends as you run across it. An Escher-esque interior littered with giant art supplies reorients itself when you pass through a mirror. Mysterious creatures dance just out of reach. Each of these is packed with secrets, requiring creative use of the game's 80 costumes. Often, puzzles will have an obvious solution using a costume you don't have, and you'll need to think outside the box. What at first appears to be a rigid lock and key puzzle quickly becomes an invitation to knock down the door.

You collect these costumes and maintain a persistent stock of them. You can carry three at once to swap between at will, and exchange these three with ones in your closet at checkpoints. If you are hit while wearing a costume, that costume is lost forever, but you can stock multiple of each one. This system is fascinating, versatile, and elegantly encapsulates both action mechanics and health. You may get a rare costume that is extremely useful, but have to use it sparingly lest you risk losing it. You can always replay stages to collect costumes, or with a bit of time investment grind out a large stock of any costume you want. Or you can wing it, risk running out, and improvise.

Each costume can perform only a single action, such as a jump or attack (or, if you're lucky, a jump that is also an attack). That means the strongest in combat are often also unable to jump. Almost every moment presents an interesting decision with real stakes and tradeoffs. The most useful costume I found for damaging the final boss was also incapable of dodging one of its rarer attacks, and if I stocked up three of them for the fight, one would have to be sacrificed periodically. I love this.

The storytelling is entirely wordless. It opens with your character, a child, experiencing such a tragedy (perhaps the death of a parent?) that she sulks around the house and the maids speak of her in hushed tones. She encounters a mysterious being - the thing on the box - that helps her conquer her conquer her grief by empowering her to help others. Each stage is the mind of a different character experiencing some kind of trauma or despair: a snowy mountain representing a girl who lost her sister and is unable to love, the aforementioned Escheresque nightmare of staircases folding on themselves representing an artist trapped by the pressure for artistic growth. Their stories are told through ornate, stylized prerendered cutscenes. Once you help them defeat the manifestations of their despair, you join them in a dance sequence that (sap that I am) brought a tear to my eye more than once. Understanding the pain of others is the best tool for overcoming our own despair.

Balan Wonderworld is one of my favorite games I have ever played. The discrediting and imprisonment of its creator lends the quality of an elegy--for a man, for an era, for a design sensibility unfettered by convention and expectations--that underscores the reality of the pain it depicts, and the desperate need for the hope and resilience we can find by sharing it.

Ehh, I dunno. Big fan of the direction, especially striking in a medium that seems to be entirely averse to cool camerawork outside of incredibly rare gems, and the aesthetic really sticks. Sound design especially deserves praise, I'm hardly an expert when it comes to that kind of thing but it was very apt. Just feels to me like it needed another runthrough to trim some of the fat. The general plot with its parabolic structure is cool but feels weirdly bloated for how short a game it is, I get what it's going for but it's not really captivating enough in its banality (That third driving section really hammers it in on ya). Really reaffirms my appreciation of Brendon Chung's work, how it feels about as dense and passion driven as this without a single second feeling wasted.

weirdly large amount of achievements for a game this short