Balan Wonderworld

The character designer and lead programmer behind Sonic the Hedgehog unite once more, and while Arzest doesn't have the best track record they do have some number of former Sega staff. While its initial reveal didn't have much of an effect on me, as the months went by I began to wonder if this could be a kind of return to form, a rebirth of that classic Sega ethos that was largely lost not too long after they started releasing games on hardware that was not their own. The release of the game's demo, of course, quelled whatever hopes I had.

Discourse on the game around the time of its launch followed a clear pattern:

"The game is mediocre at best."

"It's for kids, of course an adult would find it dull."

"A game being for kids doesn't excuse its flaws."

Frankly, even if this game wasn't meant to be anything more than an ultra-accessible spectacle for toddlers (which I don't think is particularly unlikely), I think it trips over itself to get there.

Much has been said about the "1 button" philosophy, and at the very least I do think there is something interesting going on here. The sticks and buttons on the face of the controller, the part of the controller visible to the player, are manipulated with the thumbs and control the character; the shoulder buttons, atop the edge of the controller and pressed with the index fingers, control the more indirect and abstract costume switching. There is a very clear sort of psychological separation between these two elements of the game's control, and at first it could seem almost clever, that this is something which a person unfamiliar with games could find intuitive.

But there's one glaring issue with trying to interpret the controls this way: why do the triggers, which are also obscured by the face of the controller, act like face buttons when it would make more sense in this framework for them to have the same effect as the shoulder buttons? Is it because the game expects you to control the camera yourself, meaning that if you couldn't use your index finger to jump you would be stuck using the claw grip if you wanted to play with any degree of finesse? Is it because the game released not too long after the launch of two new consoles, each boasting their own form of Adaptive Haptic HD Rumble trigger vibration?

Whatever the case is, it's just one aspect of how this particular manifestation of the "1 button" mandate fails. Sonic the Hedgehog was a game that aimed to take the Mario platforming format, and lower the skill floor while raising the skill ceiling. It made the character control as simple as possible: get rid of the run button, and make acceleration a standard feature of movement. Jumping is then the only remaining action, but the complexity comes from how the player's basic abilities interact with the slopes and hazards of the environment, this is what makes the game hard to master.

What made Sonic easy to learn was not so simple as "all the buttons do the same thing", or even that the player could always jump. The most vital piece of the puzzle is that pressing a button always consistently performed a single action.

Balan Wonderworld is not a "1 button" game. That one button can perform so many possible actions that this simply isn't a worthwhile way to think about the game. It's an entire modular keyboard, but you only have 3 key caps, and you can only press one down at a time. The player's capabilities lie in such a tangled web of conditions that the simplicity of a single button is completely undermined, yet the limitations of each of those abilities are so rigid that there's no room for growth. Balan Wonderworld is a game that is hard to really grasp, and this knowledge has no reward.

Balan Wonderworld is a game with beautiful cinematics (that look so good in fact that they make the in-game graphics somewhat pitiable), a memorable soundtrack (though a certain amount of this is definitely due to how heavily it leans into tropes and borrows from its contemporaries), and lovable character designs (that are made mostly forgettable by the fact that this game has no dialogue and the story is instead buried in supplementary material). It even has some well-structured levels that would probably be a lot more fun to explore in a game that wasn't so scared of letting you interact with them. Even the mere conceit of the sort of "Sonic Team Reunion" that put this game into motion has since been revealed to be a begrudging one.

There are things to like about it, but each comes with some obvious contradiction nested within. I can't bring myself to truly hate Balan Wonderworld, but it is one of the most hollow and rote platformers I've played in years, possibly ever.