Balan Wonderworld – Zero Punctuation

the game is more a successor to Nights into Dreams, Yuji Naka’s IP from the Sega Saturn days. I said to myself “I’ve never seen Nights into Dreams, I wonder what the fuck it’s about.” So I sat through a longplay of the game on Youtube, and when it was finished I said “I have now seen Nights into Dreams, I wonder what the fuck it’s about.” And that rather sets the tone for this review. I suppose the best approach at this point would be to try to describe exactly what happens in Barren Thunderthighs, like I’m some futuristic explorer reporting back from a mysterious alien ruin in the brief period before I get impregnated by something hideous. You play as either big-eyed girl with personal issues or big-eyed boy with personal issues, who stumbles into some kind of mysterious funhouse run by the titular Balan, who looks like what you’d get if Willy Wonka turned into a Pokemon. We are then dumped into a hub world where we get followed around a meadow by several pastel-coloured Tribbles. From there we embark upon a series of abstract platforming levels apparently based upon the psyche of a random person in the real world, who is shown in a cutscene experiencing some extremely banal difficulty in life, like “chess player doesn’t win at chess” or “bug collector’s school friends think bug collecting is a bit weird,”

then we fight an elaborate symbolic boss, then we watch a cutscene of the person overcoming their difficulty, then they and the protagonist meet up and launch into a choreographed dance number. This all happens with no dialogue. Possibly as an attempt at purely visual storytelling or to cheap out on the translation budget, but listen here, Yuji Naka – a three panel comic strip about Snoopy wanting his dinner can get by without dialogue. You need to sit down and answer a few fucking questions. What the fuck’s going on? Who’s the dude who looks like if Robert Smith from the Cure turned into a Pokemon, is he supposed to be the Satan-like villain who’s causing everyone’s problems in an attempt to sow discord in the world of men? ‘Cos the problems are so mundane I kinda feel bad for the guy. He’s clearly gotten way overdressed for the occasion and every time he shows up in gameplay he gets his dark and brooding bumcheeks handed to him in two minutes flat. The gameplay gimmick is that each world has a handful of different costumes to find with different abilities, or rather, ability. Perhaps as some kind of bet or self-imposed challenge all gameplay is based around only using one button.

Maybe they didn’t want to exclude players whose hands are trapped in cookie jars or were hoping to port the game to a garage door remote. So some costumes have a jump and some have an attack and you have to switch back and forth to enjoy the benefits of both. Some have extremely specific uses, like the conservative politician costume that you use to enter locked doors shaped like underage girls’ vaginas. And generally I’ll vaguely remember seeing one of those doors on world poo level fart but the levels are designed with so little flow and intuition that it’s hard to keep a mental map. And then there are costumes that have no use at all, like the one that turns into an immobile cube at random intervals and more often than not immediately slides off a ledge into the abyss. This is one of the many gameplay design decisions that are more bewildering than anything else. It’s like it was thought up by a six year old who was threatening that if anyone dared compromise his original vision he would refuse to eat his dinner. There’s a lot of pointless scarcity. To pick up a costume you need a single use key, but there’s almost always one in the same room, which respawns after you pick it up, so what is the fucking point of locking the costume at all.

Also, you don’t just HAVE a costume once you’ve found it. Fall off a ledge or get hit once and you lose your current costume, and if it’s a costume from a different world that you brought along to use in a highly specific situation to get one of the hidden gold trophies you need to progress in the game the way it worked in Sonic Unleashed and it was annoying as asbestos buggery back then too I’ve lost the thread of this run on sentence let’s just end it on something that sounds vaguely funny waffle bogies. On top of that it’s also easy to accidentally lose costumes because you can only carry three and picking one up kicks out whichever one you have in the third spot. That’s right, the inventory system from Treasure Island Dizzy, I’m glad we all remember it. But as I said, most of this terrible design just confuses me. I haven’t even mentioned the weird machine in the hub world that appears to do nothing except make a number ticker go up. And you can pour resources into it to make the number ticker go up more elaborately. Like some kind of uncomfortable metaphor for life as a social media influencer. See, this isn’t standard games industry terribleness. There’s clearly a vision behind it, just not a vision that operates on any light spectrum from our universe. That’s why it’s mostly more confusing than rage-inducing.

Except one thing. At some point someone pointed out to the six year old that we only ever see the player character and the germaphobic porn studio fluffer or whoever else currently needs their bullshit problem fixed, and the game’s title character doesn’t seem to be involved much. And the six year old panicked and threw his juice box ‘cos everyone needs to see how cool their character is, so every level features several unrelated asides where we have to watch Balan fly around space punching rocks and the Robert Smith dude while we press quick time events. These sequences are all basically the same and go on way longer than they need to, in that they don’t need to exist at all so that’s like infinite percent too long, mathematically speaking. And if you don’t hit all the quick time events perfectly you don’t get the gold trophy what you need to progress. So as far as the game’s concerned, three perfects and a very good is no different to spending the whole sequence rubbing the controller on your buttocks. So on this one, specific point, Balan Wonderworld can eat shit. It was weirdly interesting up to now watching it struggle to stand up like a baby deer on the ice but then it stumbled into my drinks cabinet and knocked over the amaretto.