Balan Wonderworld (PS5)

By now, Balan Wonderworld’s bad reputation precedes it. However, rather than some disaster ripe for tearing apart, Balan Wonderworld feels more like a tragedy as it has a strong visual aesthetic and plenty of ideas that could have worked for a 3D Platformer. It’s certainly not the abysmal train wreck its reputation implies, but undoubtedly the game’s director Yuji Naka, despite his pedigree in creating Sonic the Hedgehog, squandered its potential by clinging foolishly to design ideas that only ended up dragging down the end product. Exploring the dream-like Wonderworld ends up not a nightmare but instead fascinating trip into something obviously flawed but with plenty of easily identifiable room for becoming the great game the creators no doubt wanted it to be.

Right off the bat the game impresses with a beautifully realized opening scene that can easily hook the player. The visual treat follows the young protagonist, either Emma or Leo depending on how you customized your character, encountering an unusual figure named Balan who has all the accoutrements of a theater showman but with his head hidden behind a hat his facial features poke through. Balan takes the child into the Wonderworld because they have some problem in their life they need to overcome, and it appears the idea is that by helping others overcome their own negative emotions the kid might grow emotionally as well.

Each of the main worlds of Balan Wonderworld are split into two acts, a boss fight, and a post-game special stage, these worlds formed around the lifestyles of those that Balan and the child have gone to help. A farmer who fears for his crops in a storm has a world based around agriculture, a girl ostracized for her interest in bugs has a forested area full of them, and the painter who loses her inspiration has a world inspired by the logic-defying art of M.C. Escher to make for a memorable but unfortunately rather cumbersome pair of stages to explore. Balan Wonderworld often chooses not to explain things with words and this can sometimes be to its detriment as the scenes setting up the character conflicts don’t always use clear visuals, and on top of this some seem to have more care than others as a few can afford to have plenty of rendered extras while others have weird board game piece people stand in to fill a crowd. When you beat the world’s boss, usually something that ties to the visual theme and the character’s negative emotional state, you’ll help them resolve their trouble, and while sometimes this is realized in a rather sweet way, other times Balan seems willing to reverse time to save a girl’s cat but won’t apply that same help to a lady who is grieving over her dead parents.

One of the more delightfully ridiculous elements of Balan Wonderworld though is how you help someone overcome their emotional turmoil. While beating the boss opens up the path to meet with the character, rather than speaking or working through the emotions, you and that person perform an incredibly well coordinated dance with a bunch of the helpful creatures from that game world. These resplendent dance scenes are an unexpected highlight even though they begin to repeat the backing tracks and choreography eventually, but having some old man whose problem was he was injuring himself doing work no one appreciated suddenly flipping around like an acrobat adds a humorous but still visually engaging finale to that world’s conflict. However, there is another conflict bubbling under the surface, a figure named Lance seeming to be the one who helps the darkness in people manifest as huge manic-looking nightmare monsters. While he pops up here and there to drop in enemies or have a duel with Balan, his own personal story seems brushed aside, and it seems like there was a tie-in novel made for the game that does go into detail about him and other characters rather than putting such important information in the game itself.

Some of the unexpected but impressive touches emerge as you explore the worlds of Balan Wonderworld. Some just have strange visual effects for the sake of them such as levels that are curled up but unfurl as you approach the ground that was a second go completely vertical, and the first level of the game even shows a farm torn apart and reshaped into the stage. Between levels you can visit the Isle of Tims where gem Drops you collect in the stages can help feed adorable little round birds called Tims, with your work feeding them eventually paying off as they get bigger play places where you can watch them have simple and cute fun. The visual aesthetics of the stages cover both familiar ground like ice levels and more creative concepts like a whole world based around firefighting iconography. However, there are some very odd visual choices like characters who will be dancing around or waving at you until they approach them, the characters fading out before you can touch them. Sometimes a giant version of the world’s human focus can be seen and similarly disappears, and when you get a checkpoint sometimes a bunch of characters appear from nowhere to celebrate but can just as quickly fade away if you keep moving forward instead of stopping to let them have their party. This doesn’t appear to be a form of resource management, especially since the PS5 could handle a lot more than the two dancing Tornado Wolves you just saw disappear, so it’s just a weird design choice in a game that’s only gotten started in oddly executing its ideas.

Balan Wonderworld’s 3D platforming levels are all based around the idea you’ll be wearing different costumes to navigate them. Packing a whopping 80 different costumes with their own abilities, these are meant to open up new opportunities for interacting with the world, enemies, and puzzles, but instead it ends up the game’s biggest flaw. First and foremost is the odd idea where the game wants the player to be able to perform a costume’s unique ability by pressing almost any button on the controller. This means X, Square, Triangle, Circle, R2, and L2 all perform the same function, but many costumes are clearly aching for being able to do more. Jumping around is incredibly important in a platform game, especially one where a lot of the skill tests involve hopping over gaps, but not every costume can jump. For example, the Dainty Dragon costume’s one skill is too shoot a wimpy fireball out to break objects or beat enemies, but if you come up to a platforming section or even a small step that can’t just be walked up and over, you’ll have to switch to a different costume to do so.

Balan Wonderworld lets the player carry up to three costumes at once though, and funnily enough the game breaks away from its “one button” design ethos as you need to press L1 or R1 to swap between them. One of the first things you’ll learn if you want to get some enjoyment out of the game though is to never replace a costume that is proficient at jumping. Some that have a passive benefit like Bulldozer’s ability to move large blocks means that button is free for a basic jump, but a few costumes like Jumping Jack let you flutter in the air for more distance, Air Cat lets you briefly walk on air, and Floaty Flower gives you a gradual hover that slowly loses height but can let you travel long distances. The Frost Fairy is practically a necessity to get the most out of the game world after it appears though, this letting you not only gain additional vertical height but move around the air horizontally as you build a few small ice platforms. Levels are constantly designed around the idea you can jump or have one of the costumes that give you extra jump height and distance, and even when they aren’t the game also has a bad habit of placing objects only one costume can interact with in a later level to gate off collectibles.

The main goal of Balan Wonderworld is to collect enough golden Balan statues to unlock the next level, but sometimes you might see one that is behind some obstacle only a single costume can overcome. For example, only the Web Wrangler can scale spider webs, but it only can be found in the game’s third world while those spider webs can appear again far later. The only way to get a costume is to find it in a world and carry it with you in a slot, and while the checkpoints in a level can let you swap in older costumes, these have to be costumes you had in your inventory in other worlds but didn’t lose them. See, instead of having a health meter, any damage you take instead robs you of the current costume you’re wearing. Thus, while having a costume that is good at jumping is key to enjoying level designs or getting around barriers like the spider webs to still grab the statue without having to replay a big chunk of another level, you can lose it in an instant if you aren’t careful. It can be interesting to utilize Frost Fairy and other costumes to really explore the large levels of Balan Wonderworld and getting into all the nooks and crannies that pay off with statues and gems, but you’re essentially circumventing the game’s intended design and it still has plenty of statues that will only be in reach if you have the right outfit on.

There are still more issues with the costumes to look over as well. While a main function will be set to a button press, some clearly want to be a tool for a very specific situation. As such, many costumes just have inexplicable side functions you can’t directly control. For example, the Laser Launcher suit is about firing lasers from your chest to fight enemies and break stuff, but since it’s in a world in the sky, it needs a jump or it would be pretty useless. So, the action button is jump, but to fire you simply stand still and it will constantly fire while you’re standing around. Not only does it get annoying waiting around moving platforms and your chest keeps firing on its own, but other costumes handle this much worse. Quad Cannon is a chess piece costume that can jump but the turrets on its body constantly rotate and only fire when you’re at a standstill, making aiming those shots a losing game. Costumes like Box Fox though are the worst, this one shifting you into a large cube at set intervals so it can lead to an untimely death if not planned around and it is still hard to time properly for its rare moments of usefulness. It is at least presented more as a joke in Box Fox’s case, but that’s more of an exception rather than the norm.

Then again, costumes being useful for rare moments is the name of the game for most of them. Amadeus is a costume whose entire purpose is to stand on specific spots to possibly get a reward for pressing the action button, Chrono Bunny passes through time gates to slow an area down that really doesn’t ask anything beyond you having that costume so you can pass through safely, and Itsy-Bitsy Elf’s function really is just to enter tiny doors no other outfit can enter. Many of these functions ask you to swap out a potentially flexible costume for a glorified key, although the Key Mouse costume that replaces the keys you use to unlock new costumes is a more literal glorified key. Some concepts do have potential like the costumes that let you turn floating water blocks into objects you can swim through, but then you have costumes like Slow Tortoise whose thing is slowing down objects it shoots but it doesn’t work on everything and Sneaky Lizard who is meant to help you navigate one of the most confusing levels by using a tongue like a grappling hook… except you can only grapple to large gems that are fairly close to you already and grabbing them makes them disappear permanently. Were you to lose a useful jump-focused costume some stages become rough to navigate, and losing costumes that are vital to proceeding often just means backtracking to grab it again for a retry.

There is plenty of creativity to be found in the level layouts and some of the bosses, while often easy, do have special highlights to their fights, although encounters with basic enemies in the level often don’t have them putting up much of a fight. Worse though is that if you choose not to fight the little weaklings, their battle music will continue playing until you’re really far away, often covering up some pretty good musical tracks from the game’s soundtrack. Every now and then you might encounter one of the minigame costumes where you play a small sport-themed diversion that doesn’t waste a costume slot. While not too substantial, they at least aren’t harmful and aren’t tied to some underwhelming situational ability like most costumes are. However, there is another minigame type that wears outs it welcome incredibly quickly, and that’s Balan’s Bout.

If you find a golden hat in a level, you will briefly get to take control of Balan in a segment where he flies through a wide open area in the sky. It’s not too clear what he’s doing here or why, but he will eventually encounter something he wants to break. Most of the times these are giant chunks or pieces of rubble, and the player needs to press a button the moment a translucent image of Balan lines up with his actual body to destroy them. These segments are both far too easy and far too strict, since if you don’t time the button press perfectly every time, you end up not getting the statue reward for playing them and the hats only reappear after you’ve beaten the world’s boss. However, even playing them once is already tedious and slow, the segment going on way too long for just a few timed button press challenges and the game even quickly recycling animations for Balan’s Bout so it isn’t even new each time. Sometimes he may duel Lance here, but it doesn’t make it more interesting, and what’s worse, as you progress in the game Balan’s Bout becomes more common and a bit longer. Later levels can pack up to three and some of the golden hats are fairly close to each other so you can do this immensely dull minigame far too frequently if you take the game up on each time it is possible to play. You can beat the main story with only statues earned through exploring the levels, but you’ll of course need to be holding onto jump-focused costumes if you want to grab enough for that Balan’s Bout-free approach to work.

THE VERDICT: Balan Wonderworld is a baffling mix of bad ideas and squandered potential. When you have a costume like Air Cat or Frost Fairy the worlds can be interesting playgrounds for exploration, but the game wants you to keep grabbing costumes with limited utility, no jump function, or odd ideas like activating their ability in unusual ways. The stylish flair in many of the visuals and the creative world concepts are let down as they are bent to try and force you to use rigid and dull costume abilities, and with the recycling of the awful Balan’s Bout minigame on top of that, cute touches like the Isle of Tims and after-boss dance parties can’t endear the player enough to drown out the glaring flaws.

And so, I give Balan Wonderworld for PlayStation 5…

A BAD rating. Suggesting ways to fix Balan Wonderworld is almost too easy. You can give each costume a jump button and another button for their unique skill, you can make levels about utilizing a strict set of functional costumes they are designed around instead of having them carry between levels, you can have the player able to carry more costumes than just three, you can have costumes easily selectable from a menu while between levels to carry into a stage, you can have it so the player has costume slots for specific roles and they’ll replace each other based on utility rather than just replacing whichever one is at the end of the list… however you slice it though, the costume system is definitely the game’s huge missed opportunity and the area where it keeps creating issues. Balan Wonderworld will sometimes place an obstacle just to justify an otherwise useless costume and then do nothing interesting with it, forcing you to swap out something that could have had more potential or better contributed to platforming, puzzle solving, or combat. Some costumes barely even seem to do their intended effect, like Telepotter’s strictly horizontal teleport being hard to space well and the fire hydrant inspired Water Blaster just dropping a water globule in front of you unless you charge it up long enough to hit something besides your feet. The single button concept coupled with such a wide range of bad ideas and poor realization hurts a game whose levels did show promise as platforming challenges, and when you’re using a jump-focused suit it actually nearly realizes it until you find you can’t worm your way around a specific barrier. Balan’s Bout on the other hand just feels like a complete write-off, the timed button presses in no way exciting, the recycling brazen, and their point dubious at best beyond being filler to pad out a game that certainly didn’t need it.

So many things like the odd story could just make it a quirky romp and the style definitely makes the world inviting, but the costumes really weigh down the Balan Wonderworld experience. It’s a fascinating playthrough and if you keen to what costumes to keep it can be made more bearable, but so much of its design tries to sabotage you exploring its platforming spaces that even a playthrough born of morbid curiosity can be a struggle. Without the likes of Frost Fairy, Floaty Flower, and the other costumes that actual improve your platforming skill instead of limit it or allow you to overcome an arbitrary limitation, Balan Wonderworld would be a remarkably worse experience, but there is at least room to see a game that has creativity and wonder despite the director ruining the show with unnecessary and bizarre mandates.