Oh, and since every face button does the same thing, this means there isn’t a “cancel” button in menus, either. More than once I found myself in trouble because I didn’t have any forms that could jump. Every face button does the exact same thing, and your equipped costume determines what that is. If you die, you’ll lose your equipped costume and need to pick it up again if you still want to use it. The key is usually a few feet away, making it a pointless way to add time to the process.
Costumes are scattered across the levels, and you need a key to pick one up. The core gameplay revolves around finding unlockable costumes, and this is where the real flaws start to show. Bafflingly, there is a novel tie-in featuring the story context the game is missing, and it would have been so much better if that was actually in the game. It’s an interesting concept, and I just wish the game actually connected these disjointed stories to the overarching game a bit more clearly. Cutscenes before and after the boss fight explain that world’s story, and they all follow a similar structure: a character has a dream or passion, something happens to fill them with negative emotions and they fall into darkness, and your fight against the boss frees them and lets them find their happiness again.
This adds a puzzle-like element as you try to figure out how to use your costumes to attack in different phases if you want all three statues. While each boss only takes three hits to defeat, you get a Balan Statue for each phase you damage the boss in.
Each world has two stages and then a boss fight (plus a third stage unlocked after you beat the main game). The main goal or not, it was certain my driving motivation to keep going into those worlds.ĭespite having large areas to explore, the stages have a fairly linear progression, with a single goal to reach at the end and side paths to explore along the way to find the collectibles. Due to the gameplay loop of grabbing drops, feeding Tims, and visiting more worlds, I probably would have assumed building the tower was the main goal of the game if it didn’t actually say “sub-objective.” Tims are adorable, and watching them speed across the island to eat the drops I’d scattered was one of the things I actually really enjoyed in the game. The hub contains a tower that is slowly constructed as the Tims spin a wheel, so having more Tims speeds up that process.
Feeding Tims eventually lets you hatch more Tims, and you’ll also find eggs hidden as collectibles. You also collect colorful drops in each world, which you can then feed to the Tims, small creatures that live on the Isle of Tims. Each world is filled with golden statues of Balan, and once you get enough Balan Statues, you activate a train to more worlds… or rather, the train drives you around the island while more world entrances pop up around it. I don’t need a lot of story in my 3D platformers “the princess has been captured and you need to find these stars to unlock the doors” is good enough for me when it comes to this genre, but somehow Balan Wonderworld lacks even that. In my original preview, I suggested this lack of context might be because it was a demo, but that isn’t the case. After that cutscene, you find yourself in the Isle of Tims hub world to start visiting worlds and grabbing collectibles. That’s pretty much all the story context you get. Balan Wonderworld begins with an unhappy child, either a boy or girl you get to choose between at the start, running away from their situation and meeting Balan, who says they’re missing their heart and sweeps them off into his wonderworld. The demo for Balan Wonderworld didn’t leave me impressed, but I held out hope that the final game would be a big improvement.
MonsterVine was provided with a Switch code for review.
Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch (reviewed) Switch between numerous costumes that each grant you a single power and seek out collectibles in a colorful 3D platformer plagued by questionable design decisions.