Art of Balance (Wii U)

With a gorgeous zen presentation, Art of Balance takes the sometimes nerve-wracking process of trying to balance a set of wooden blocks and transforms it into something calm and relaxing. Your work happens above a tub of water that catches the rays of sunlight coming in through the window just right, potted plants decorate in the background, and gentle tunes keep things meditative and comfy. Even when the background changes across the 200 levels, you’re still in a quiet, simple space that looks like a slice of pleasant reality, so perhaps it might sound strange that eventually you’ll be using burning blocks to destroy others or even completely invert gravity to build upside-down stacks. Impressively though, even these added concepts don’t fracture the atmosphere.

 

In a level of Art of Balance, a set of blocks will placed out in a line before you, the goal being to arrange them in a stable stack despite their sometimes strange shapes. There are some typical ones to be found, rectangles, circles, x-shapes, and half-circles, but there are some like a large arrow or dumbbell that will certainly require more than common sense to carefully integrate into the tiny towers you find yourself building. However, there is a nice touch in the fact that every time you encounter a certain shape, the block will be the same size as last time, ensuring you can develop a gradual understanding of how different pieces interlock or balance each other out. Levels are differentiated not only by the types of blocks provided for your building task but by the platform you’ll be building it on, the player having to consider how a less stable base can influence their work as well. The good news is that once all blocks are placed, a countdown starts that only needs to count to three before it considers your efforts a success. Even if your tower is unstable or even in the process of tipping over, if the countdown completes before the blocks hit the water or fall outside the tub, you get credit for completing the level. Already there can be more than one arrangement to complete a level, but this somewhat lenient system for declaring success means there is some flexibility in how you can approach a stage without it completely erasing the difficulty since the countdown does take a full three seconds to resolve.

The physics in Art of Balance are consistent and clean, the results of your work identical each time you attempt a specific action. The only minor disruption I could find to how blocks held together or behaved was in a very late game stage where a glass block, after gravity was inverted, would lightly clip into another block, but the arrangement would have already been doomed to fall without this small glitch and elsewhere things behaved reliably. Art of Balance does start you off with just stacking wooden blocks to keep things simple and help you find your footing, but in each of the worlds, the game will introduce some new concern that becomes that world’s focus. These include things like the glass blocks that will fracture if too many other blocks are placed atop them, burning blocks that will disappear if they touch another one that’s on fire, and blocks that will completely invert gravity the moment they’re placed, but by cordoning them off into a world that fully explores them, you’re free to mostly focus on how these new elements influence the stack-building play. Eventually they will all be featured together in the final world, but by then you would have learned how to handle them well enough separately this can serve as a solid finale to the work featured elsewhere. Perhaps a smaller but even more influential idea is introduced not as a world gimmick but a consistent feature, that being that some blocks in a stage only become available after you have placed others. This can force you to make tough choices on when and where you place something like a glass block or gravity-shifting shape, the game moving you out of your comfort zone of relying on familiar relationships between shapes by sometimes necessitating more precarious placement.

 

Art of Balance does limit the speed with which you can place a block, whether you use the Wii U gamepad’s touch screen, buttons to control on screen cursors, or even a Wii remote, so you’re not going to be able to toss blocks into the pile quickly enough to try and offset any teetering or counterbalance any tipping scales. This ensures that thought goes into your work rather than a focus on quick reflexes, although the control methods can hit the occasional snag. While rarely does Art of Balance demand pixel perfect placement, the exact spot a block is dropped is key to managing a stack’s balance, so naturally you’ll want to sometimes carefully place a shape in just the right position. Sometimes though your cursor carrying the block around can slightly obscure part of the shape, making lining up its placement a touch rougher. The beautiful backdrops can interfere a little too, such as in levels with bright sunlight. If the stack reaches a certain height and you’re moving a block in front of those sunbeams, it can blur your vision a bit and again lightly hamper attempts at pinpoint precision. As mentioned Art of Balance isn’t usually incredibly picky about where things need to go for absolute success, but when dealing with odder shapes, the way they land can be key to if they settle into a nice position or roll right off to their doom. This disruption won’t appear often, but it is a rare wrinkle in the game’s otherwise effective approach to making puzzle solutions more about figuring out the broader tower design rather than making sure everything’s position is exact to the pixel.

One element that can help avoid potential frustration is the way worlds are presented. Levels in a world are arranged in a set of cubes, each one containing a level and unlocking any levels they’re touching when completed. This often ensures more than one level in a world is available at a time as the cube structure branches off, and simply by completing a level you also earn rings that eventually unlock additional worlds. New worlds can be unlocked before you completely finish a previous one, meaning again if one stage really isn’t clicking you can continue on to something new to try. In these cube structures there are also challenge levels though, these orange cubes containing stages where some unique pressure is applied to your work. This can be things like requiring the stack to reach a certain height as well as the normal stability requirement or adding a timer to your work so you often need to have the stage figured out in full rather than feeling your way to the solution, but some instead add a unique balancing beam to the action where you need to build your tower on already precarious ground. Art of Balance does a good job of never getting too complicated in the demands placed on you and so these don’t feel like a huge jump in a difficulty nor do they strain things like the limits on how quickly you can place a block, instead serving as a nice change up in between the normal stages.

 

Art of Balance’s Arcade mode contains the 200 levels that test your tower-building abilities in a wide range of well-realized ways, but it’s not the only way to play. Endurance mode focuses instead on consistent success. In Arcade mode you can retry levels quickly and as many times as it takes, but Endurance only allows three losses before your run comes to an end. The goal ends up being to complete as many stages as you can in a row before you’ve failed too many times, this adding a bit of longevity after you’ve completed all normal puzzles but the two multiplayer modes are perhaps more promising in that regard. Up to five players can attempt Tower Tumble where players take turns adding a piece to a large stack. Once someone adds one that causes it to collapse, everyone else earns a point. Devious play and daring imbalances can actually be rewarded here, but the Swift Stacker mode instead takes the normal play and has people compete to clear the same puzzle. The focus is on doing so more quickly than other players in a game that usually benefits from taking things calmly and carefully so it’s perhaps not the most complementary concept for a multiplayer mode, but it at least allows of the true comparison of skill in how quickly someone can sightread a set of blocks and make a stable structure.

THE VERDICT: Art of Balance has an excellent handle on the scope of its stack-building stages where they can be challenging but manageable, this allowing for the many unique block types and challenge formats to be integrated without disrupting its calm atmosphere. Some extra modes like the multiplayer games give it greater longevity, but already its selection of 200 levels are smartly designed to train you up to better identify how to build a balanced structure while also continuing to challenge those skills despite elements like the completion countdown being tipped in your favor.

 

And so, I give Art of Balance for Wii U…

A GOOD rating. While many games based around balancing objects will have their fiddly moments, Art of Balance mostly avoids the toll those can take on an interested player’s patience with its flexibility and self-imposed limitations. You won’t be asked to build enormous precise towers, but the disruptive shapes you are provided can still make even smaller stacks demand some thought, especially when the game withholds some blocks until others are placed. What really helps the game keeps its energy is the continued introduction of new ideas. While the challenge stages introduce something a little tougher and demanding, it’s when the game starts getting more creative with things like reversing gravity that you start to have to think even deeper about the ways the blocks will hold together or can be placed. By rarely actually demanding you do things quickly and making retries easy, you’re given room to experiment and figure out the relationships between blocks and whatever pre-existing objects exist in the water tub your work takes place over. There can be a few moments where you balk at how things unfold, reversed gravity means a loss is determined once a block passes an invisible line in the air and sometimes it can feel like you only barely crossed it, but the play is almost entirely consistent and so you will learn the limits and what works in one level will remain applicable in similar situations down the line. It is perhaps for the best there are no extra rewards to give reason to return to a completed stage, as the game isn’t built for speedy or perfect completions and modes like Endurance and Swift Stacker do feel a little at odds with the tone seen elsewhere. They still function soundly though so they can let the player feel out if they like the variation on normal play, but Art of Balance definitely has a clear understanding of how to build its challenges to hit a sweet spot of being approachable but just difficult enough.

 

Art of Balance has received a few releases, usually undergoing changes with each one, the Wii and 3DS getting it before this specific iteration on the game. It would receives ports to PS4 and Switch as well after, although the PS4’s absolute dependence on control sticks feels like it will be the only one that will come up short in terms of how you interact with the game. Already in this version, rotating blocks can only be done by a button press that turns a block the same amount every time, limiting how exactly a block can be placed but thankfully not to a damaging degree. It seems the Wii U release was the last time unique content was added to the package, but it is fortunate that no matter which system it might be best on, it seems Shin’en Multimedia wants to ensure its smart and careful execution on the simple premise of balancing blocks remains available for people to continue to enjoy.