This is a game I’ve been morbidly curious about basically since it came out. I quite like 3D collectathon platformers, and if I can afford it, I try to play all the ones I can get my hands on, even if they’re not very good. It’s been a long wait, but I’ve been biding my time ever since waiting for it to get at or below the threshold at which I find it reasonable to buy a game even if I’ll end up disliking it. I ended up getting engaged with it a lot more than I at first thought I would, first beating it, and then spending the whole weekend finishing it out nearly 100% (a couple costumes and achievements I didn’t feel it was worth my time to slog through, but I got all 300 statues). It took me around 35 to 40 hours (the game doesn’t keep track, so far as I’m aware, so I had to give my best estimate) to do it all (and beating the game originally took me around 13 or 15 hours).

Balan Wonderworld’s story is somewhat infamously told with very, very little dialogue. After the opening cutscene of your main character stumbling into the titular Balan’s world, he gives you a well animated but surreal introduction, and the subtitles there are just about the last text you’ll see as far as the story goes. The rest of the story is told through pantomime as you make your way through one world at a time, helping the character associated with that world overcome their fears and doubts to do the difficult thing in their real life. It’s somewhere between Psychonauts and Nights (with which this game shares a lot of DNA), but it’s lighthearted and fun enough to give the action a fun premise and aesthetic.

Another somewhat infamous note about the story is that there is a book separately available that’s effectively a novelization of the game’s narrative, though I’d be hard pressed to say that the game is worse off for not having loads of text explaining its story. It’s not like Mario Odyssey is a good 3d platformer because it has hundreds of pages of text explaining some deep narrative, after all. Balan Wonderworld makes the smart decision to keep the in-game story as brief as it needs to be, and I found it a fun and well paced setting for the adventure to take place.

The gameplay of Balan is a stage-based 3D platformer which uses a similar approach to something like Banjo Kazooie. In each stage, there are 6+ Balan statues (the equivalent of a jiggy or power star) to find. Six are scattered about, and an extra 1 to 3 are unlocked by perfecting Balan’s Bouts (which I will explain later). You need a certain total number of statues to unlock more worlds to explore, and there are 12 worlds in total with 2 acts each, with a third act to each world being unlocked after you’ve beaten the final boss. The main difference to something like Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie is that, even though you do have the statues to collect, each level does have an end point you need to reach to complete it. This lends to a more well paced level design generally, and it also makes the Balan statues a bit easier to find. Ones you’ve found are listed in order in the upper left, so it’s a bit easier to try and guess where you might’ve missed one by using process of determination based on the ones you’ve already found.

The way you actually navigate these stages is by running and jumping around them via the aid of costumes you find in the levels. A big deal was made during its release that Balan Wonderworld is a “one-button game”. While not entirely true (you use the shoulder buttons to swap between costumes and the pause button opens the menu, for example), just about every button does the same thing, so the costumes are how the game gives you more depth to your exploration despite the simplicity. You can bring any costume to any stage, and you can stockpile extra copies in your little wardrobe you can access at checkpoints. Getting hit once will lose you your costume, but it’s generally not too difficult to avoid getting hit. It’s a good motivator to be extra careful with your best and favorite costumes, at the very least.

While the one-button gameplay does make navigating some menus a little bit more cumbersome than it feels like it should be, I found it to be a nice accessibility feature that the game is well designed around. Finding new costumes and experimenting with what they could do was always fun, and each of the 12 worlds is designed around the abilities its respective costumes give you, making the puzzle design generally nice and intuitive as well. I say “generally” because just about every stage has at least some statues that can’t be acquired using only the costumes found within it. Sometimes you’ll be waiting a very long time to get the costume that makes a much earlier world’s final statues collectible. This isn’t a super problem, given that you only need less than half of the statues to beat the game, but as an element of design philosophy, it’s one I’m not a fan of. I much prefer the approach the original Banjo Kazooie takes, were even though you’re progressively unlocking new abilities, every world can be completed as soon as you get to it. The fact that some statues are just impossible to get at first approach can make ones that are otherwise just difficult to access seem actually impossible, and it just makes for a somewhat frustrating waste of time trying to collect them sometimes.

Each stages has tons of little colored crystals to collect, and you can multiply your currently held crystal total by completing the Balan’s Bouts. These are QTE-based cutscenes that you can activate by finding Balan’s hat hidden in the stage. They’re just easy enough to be far from impossible, but also not so easy as to be trivial. The fight animations in them are quite pretty and the music is fun too, so I didn’t mind replaying them in my long quest to acquire all 300 statues in the game. That said, even if you hate them, collecting crystals is ultimately entirely optional, and you only need 110 of the 228 total statues available in the main game to beat it, so you can ignore the Balan’s Bouts entirely if you want (which I certainly appreciate, even if I did like them).

The purpose of all those crystals, however, is to feed your Tims on the Isle of Tims in the hub world. You can either breed them by feeding them crystals or find eggs in stages to get more Tims. In stages, you’ll have little fluffy companions following you around. They’ll sometimes bring you crystals, keys, or even eggs or new Tims themselves as well as help you fight enemies. These Tims are very much like the Chao Gardens were in the Sonic Adventure games. They’re ultimately something not required to beat the game, but the crystal collecting and Tim raising is a nice activity to give extra purpose to replaying stages as well as a fun side activity in and of itself. Feed the Tims more crystals and they’ll play in the Tower o’ Tims in the hub world, and playing in it makes a counter go up which will make the Tower o’ Tims grow ever larger and more complex. The fact that you need to wait for the counter to go up can be a bit annoying if you’re power gaming for achievements and whatnot, but it’s ultimately an entirely optional activity, so I find it difficult to complain about too seriously.

The presentation of Balan Wonderworld is where it shines brightest, in my opinion. Character design, particularly of Balan, his rival Lance, and the game’s bosses, are excellent, and seeing new worlds and boss designs was always such a treat. The mechanical design of the bosses is even clever too, as each has 3 primary ways to hit it, and doing each respectively will net you another statue for each one. The costumes are all super cute and fun as well, and the same goes for the enemy design. The world design can feel a bit overly blocky and simple at times, but this is in service of making the world very mechanically consistent. You never need to worry if a door or a barrel is secretly breakable from some future costume, because the only breakable objects are the very clearly marked cracked blocks, for example. That said, the simplicity sometimes works against it. There are some costumes that let you get around vertically quite a lot, and while the game has a surprising lack of invisible walls preventing you from climbing the scenery, it is not completely devoid of them. This can lead to some frustrating deaths if you’re going for the harder to reach statues as you try to do a little bit of guesswork on what weird outcroppings can actually be stood on vs. those that can’t. This is a rare problem, but it’s certainly a present one.

The music is also very nice. A lot of memes and jokes were made of the little dance party scenes that play when you beat bosses, but the music in them is still fun and well done. My personal favorite track is the song that plays during the Balan’s Bouts, which made replaying them for statues even more fun x3. The animated cutscenes before and after bosses are also very pretty, even though the game itself looks pretty rough for a game on PS4 quite frequently. Therein actually lies my biggest complaint with the game: it’s pretty damn poorly optimized. I had to download a 2gb patch to play this when I first installed it on my PS4, and even then, a year and a half after release, there are some areas that have some really bad framerate drops. Only the framerate, not the action, actually drops, meaning if you just stay the course you won’t die, but it can still lead to some quite frustrating deaths in ways that really should not be the case. The game just doesn’t look good enough to be having these types of technical problems, and though I’ve heard the game runs with basically no problems on PC, let this be a warning for anyone considering picking up the PS4 version at least.

Verdict: Recommended. Technical issues aside, I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed my time with Balan Wonderworld. While it’s certainly not perfect, and exactly to whom to recommend it to is a little tricky (the difficult curve for example starts a a bit too easy for veterans yet it ends a bit too hard for beginners, I’d say), it’s still a very competent game. Outside of how it was certainly not worth $60 at launch, this is a situation a lot like I experienced with Mighty No. 9 last year. The game itself holds up pretty damn well for something with such a toxic reputation, so it was weird to me just how solid it was. It’s absolutely worth it at the current price point, and while it’s not the easiest game to recommend 100%-ing like I did, it’s absolutely worth picking up for any fans of 3D platformers. At the very least, I’d say it’s a far more polished and well put together game than other modern 3D platformers I’ve played like Yooka Laylee or Super Lucky’s Tale, so if those didn’t exactly wow you like they didn’t wow me, Balan Wonderworld just might do it for you~