Is ‘Balan Wonderworld’ the worst game of 2021?

At the end of the year, it’s typical to reflect on the highs and the lows of the previous 12 months. A load of gamers and gaming journalists have been doing that, and there’s one game that’s been frequenting the ‘worst of 2021’ lists with an almost unerring regularly – Balan Wonderworld, a platformer that has been absolutely slated. But then I happened upon an article defending the game, suggesting that the critics are being unfair in their assessment of Balan Wonderworld, and that many of the criticisms don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Now I have my hands on a copy of the game, I wanted to offer my own reflection – is Balan Wonderworld really the worst game of 2021?

The game is a platform adventure in which you play as a boy or a girl, who is transported away to a dreamlike fantasy land by the grinning showman Balan (the exact reasons for this are not explained, resulting in a baffling experience). I believe that you’re meant to help out the NPCs in some respect by collecting things, but I’m not sure why. Anyhow, if you reach the end of the levels, you advance to later ones, and you have a selection of costumes to give you new abilities to aid you in exploration.

In January last year, a free demo was released on the Switch eShop, and much of the excitement about the game just vanished. The quality was sketchy at best, with a lot of the game’s promise seemingly squandered with lousy controls and a very bitty performance. A lot of people were put off Balan Wonderworld before it released and, frankly, they’d have been disappointed with the final product, which wound up being worse in some aspects. (The decision to remove the demo a few months later, with it looking like an attempt to mask the poor quality, was poorly received.)

Balan rings of good ideas that the development team just couldn’t translate into anything overly interesting

The fundamental thing to get right in a platformer is the platforming, and Balan drops the ball in this most essential quality. The controls are clunky and unresponsive, and hampered by a bizarre design choice to limit the powers to a single button – aside from the joystick for movement and the shoulder buttons to change costume, your other buttons all do the same thing. It’s unnecessarily limiting and, as you’re only allowed three costumes a stage, you can even soft-lock yourself without the ability to jump or attack (for example) because attacks cause you to lose the costume entirely.

Coupled with this, none of the stages are that fun to traverse, nor are the collection aspects particularly engaging. The main challenge is finding Balan statues, but they’re hidden behind painfully simple obstacles that require a suit to access. Costumes are hidden in purple gems that require a key to unlock, and they’re often not worth the hassle because they’re so much overlap between them. Balan rings of good ideas that the development team just couldn’t translate into anything overly interesting.

There are some good points, not least the character design and the graphics. It’s not the best-looking game I’ve ever seen, but I love the art style and I think it really brings the world to life (as does a frankly strong soundtrack). The performance is not the greatest, but it does the job sufficiently and there were points where I wanted to know the mythos of the dream world. Balan itself is also really well designed, and I’m slightly disappointed that we didn’t get to play as it, like the name implies. There are hints of good ideas, like the fact you can damage bosses three times and you pick up an award for each, but they rarely translate into anything worthwhile.

Is Balan Wonderworld the worst game of 2021? No, far from it – the amount of cheap crap sitting alongside the game on the eShop is proof enough of that, and despite Balan’s issues, at least it functions. But people are judging it so much because it’s such a high-profile flop – it was made by Square Enix, and it had the weight of expectation behind it, a weight that it really failed to live up to. Perhaps the critics were a little unfair in their dismissal, but I found the Nintendo Life article having a go at those critics to be just as unfair – but either way, Balan is an objectively bad game, and one that was unenjoyable to play through.