Balan Wonderworld Review

The art direction is not in question. Balan's theater, the storybook framing and twelve chapters about people avoiding something they cannot face are the work of designers who still know how to compose an image, the score is lovely, and the cutscenes are handsome. The control scheme is what people mean when they call this a failure. Every face button and both triggers perform one action, and which action depends on the costume you are wearing, so a costume built for attacking simply cannot jump.

In a platformer. Eighty costumes sounds generous and plays like a cupboard: many duplicate each other, most are useful in exactly one room, and you can only cycle through the costumes you are already carrying, so levels become fetch and change instead of anything with flow. The boss encounters are the low point, the same animation replayed while you press a button as two shapes line up, four to six times a fight.

The hub asks you to feed birds droplets to grow a machine that does very little with them. None of this is broken the way most of this list is broken, and that is the honest reason it sits a tier off the floor. It runs, it looks good, and it behaves exactly as designed. The design is the problem.