QCF: Balan WonderWorld

here are developers out there who hold some of the highest prestige in the industry from their work on a few, or even just iconic game—some of these developers have gone on to do great things in the current day scene, and then there are some who are just stuck in the past.

Yuji Naka’s Balan WonderWorld is an indictment of the latter because the new release from Arzest and the Balan Company is seemingly engineered to compete with platformer games released back in 2003 more than anything else. At its core, Balan Wonderworld plays like a pale imitation of the Super Mario Odyssey formula dressed up in a bad NiGHTs into Dreams aesthetic…

I know I started marching my steps strong and heavy with the Poo Poo Parade real early into this review but I honestly can’t help it; for every neat idea the game seems to have, it comes back with three more flaws or design choices that put a big sour on any fun to be found.

From what I could gather since the narrative does such a bizarrely poor job of spelling out what exactly is happening, Balan WonderWorld also borrows the concept of playing through dreams from NiGHTS as well. The big difference is that instead of roaming through the subconscious/slumbering kind, the Dreams here are more of the aspirational variety, all explored through the filter of a Broadway Theater production for some reason. Players will be able to take on the role of either Emma Craig or Leo Cole, a boy and girls so blandly designed both aesthetically and conceptually that they as well be palate swapped versions of the same Character Model. They are led to the Isle of Tims by the eponymous Balan himself, who promises a “WonderWorld” where they can find their real selves by seemingly sightseeing the trials and tribulations of other people who’re chasing surreal manifestations of their dreams. The premise here, as incoherent as its pacing may be, is undeniably charming at its core. Admiring the Japanese spin on Alice in Wonderland juxtaposed with a little Cinderella only gets the concept so far, however, as it's held back by a number of things, the first of which is the garish presentation of it all.

The art direction is a big point of contention because the folks behind Balan WonderWorld aren’t strangers to the dated bobble-headed CGI art style that’s employed with works like Billy Hatcher and more in their resume—yet here the look of it all is just so obnoxious and at times just plain cringey. Aside from the unnecessarily slender and uneven proportions to everything is the weird color scheme choices—some levels have a pleasing balance of cool or warm shades to their look, most of the stages just hit the gas on these energetically bright colors without any regard to the scale of contrast they lack with one another. The art direction tries so hard to nail the spectacle of a live theatre production, but comes off looking like a gaudy Pachinko machine most of the time instead.

The music is thankfully the one exception, as out of place as it may seem, considering the composition has a Cats vibe to it played over visuals that resemble a Cirque du Soleil number. Although many of the tracks are rearrangements of the overall theme, a few memorable songs are bound to be hummed by players at some point of their time with the title.

Look and sounds aside, the hook to Balan WonderWorld is where the conversation really begins and is easily both its biggest strength, and biggest weakness. As players traverse through these different dreamscape worlds, they’ll notice that they have only a single maneuver in their repertoire—a jump, and an arguably lousy one at that, with too-little airtime in your leaps to prevent players from crossing anything more than the smallest of gaps in the road. In order to navigate through the obstacles of the stage, players will come across costumes that each possesses a unique power for them to use against the obstacles that lie ahead. Three costumes can be carried at a time and swapped out for any stored costumes at various checkpoints within a level. Accessing these astral closets does add a layer of freedom to mix and match different load-outs for whatever the situation calls for when advancing through the world, especially when a costume power removes your jump, which yeah, a good chunk of, them will actually glue you to the ground. As simple as the setup is, it admittedly lends to some creative liberties that can produce some memorable moments, especially in the early chapters of 3 and 4, but it’s all squandered by the clunky execution of the mechanics, in terms of follow-through of the dynamics in action, and raw technical performance of the game as a whole.

One of the endearing qualities to the appeal of a 3D platformer is the larger-than-life level designs they offer players to dive deep and explore in—Balan WonderWorld misses the mark hard here. There’s little to no rhythm behind the architectural design of the courses; every level in the game is made of these large masses of land that mostly culminate upon the main roadway, intersecting with other floating isles that all hang over a giant abyss of sky. This mostly linear approach ends up funneling players towards the goal in a straight line, with the occasional point of interest to discover, defeating a lot of the point behind the exploratory platformer setup. When players do get the opportunity to explore off the beaten path, however, plotting these hidden routes can become an inexcusable exercise of patience. The numerous little forks in the road that are thrown in are so unnaturally placed that navigating them feels like an active exploit that could break the game than an actual area that can be traversed, reducing any sense of discovery offered into an unintuitive nightmare. I can’t begin to count how many nooks and crannies I hugged or scraped against in order to maintain this constant tug-o-war against the game’s physics only so that I could arrive upon a seemingly random alcove that contained one of the important collectibles I needed to progress. The builds of these levels baffled me to no end the further I went, like—I’ve played maps in Roblox and Minecraft that had better direction than these levels—maps that were created by children no less.

This strange, nebulous direction of world-building ultimately made touring Balan WonderWorld a disorienting trek at best, and a boring chore at worst.

That’s not the worst of it though, as the bad level design of Balan WonderWorld is exacerbated by the insipid, and times disjointed implementation of its trademark costume system. While the game features over eighty costumes to discover and use, over two-thirds of them are worthless beyond the few contextual moments they were designed for. For example, there’s a butterfly costume that’s found in Chapter 3 where players cannot only hover across chasms for a brief time, but they’ll be able to fly greater distances in the air if the player is in a dark area. Most of the abilities these magical suits offer are annoyingly one-dimensional, distinguishable only by that one asterisk to their enhancement that will inevitably reduce the power-up to a two, maybe three-trick pony at most for the entirety of the adventure. Don’t get me wrong, there were definitely moments of satisfaction anytime I used the right costume for the situation, but then these instances were quickly followed by a sigh because the costume was just an ever so slight variation of the last one. There are a variety of mini-game costumes that can create moments of diversion, each based around a different sport, but after a few vague sentences of tutorial, and mere seconds of the game in action later, they’ll often end before you can even process what happened, or if they were even important to your quest, to begin with. By the time I hit Chapter 6, the monotony of cycling through gimmick costume after the other became this rote process that frayed my nerves.

The one juncture where this dynamic does shine is the boss fights, where each boss has three different weak points that can be exploited from the different costumes available in the arena. The process of dissecting the different vulnerabilities of each tactic is honestly the most fun I’ve had with the mechanic, and game me something to look forward to after slogging through two chapters of erratic tripe to get there. Under a microscope, it’s important to specify that these mechanics here aren’t fundamentally broken, just weirdly dated and half-baked. A lot of the design philosophy at work relies on rudimentary puzzles and hazards that weren’t even cutting edge twenty years ago, let alone a time that’s post-Super Mario Odyssey and Yooka-Laylee.

For all of the game’s conceptual shortcomings, the technical side of it is even more abysmal. I want to clarify that my impressions of Balan WonderWorld’s performance are based on the Xbox One X version of the game, so I can’t honestly speak for the Next-Gen versions of the game for PS5 or Xbox Series x, but nonetheless, these operational hiccups were just too gross to overlook. Where to start; for a game engine built around a shallow map layout that features hardly any textures or effect to them, the load times are unreasonably long, like forty seconds or more long. Frames will fluctuate wildly, especially during costume changes, a process that only features few unique frames of animation over the core character model before smash-cutting to the new costume asset, a defect that is all the more grating from the frequency of changing your skill-based wardrobe. Even though the game boasts 4k fidelity, the graphics are constantly marred with dithering artifacts anytime the camera gets too close—which becomes all-too apparent during a cut-scene rendered with the in-game graphics as the camera will pan through a variety of shots, exposing the bad dithering effects to an almost comedic degree.

I didn’t know what to expect from Balan WonderWorld when I first popped it into my console, but I had some degree of confidence in it given the pedigree of its production from the likes of Yuji Naka and Square Enix. Within hours of playtime, any confidence I had going into the experience had wearily evaporated from my frazzled being—Balan WonderWorld is amateur hour by today’s standards on so many levels, hell I’d even argue that sentiment against the earliest generations of 3D Platformer games as well. The debut release from the Balan Company is nothing more than a few good ideas buried under a mountain of bad ones, made all the more offensive with its $60 price tag for admission. Don’t waste your time with it—there are dozens of other 3D platformers that are far more deserving of your hard drive space, and some are even half the cost.