Balan Wonderworld
PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
One thing you can count on from any Yuji Naka game is a sprinkling of magic. Since he left Sega 15 years ago, the career of Sonic’s creator has been mixed, but as producer at indie studio Prope he’s overseen a range of smaller games, each shot through with summery charm and vibrant colour. Five years ago he seemed to have run aground with the inexplicably awful Rodea: The Sky Soldier on Wii U – yet that was a bastardised version of a Wii game that turned out to be much better. We hoped, then, that his reunion with Nights Into Dreams director Naoto Ohshima might be a return to Sonic Team form. Alas, our optimism seems to have been misplaced.
Which isn’t to say that the old Naka magic is entirely absent. It’s there in Balan himself, a mischievous but seemingly benevolent prankster who looks for all the world like a secret unlockable character from Nights. It’s there in the bright, energetic cutscenes, too. We’re quickly introduced to protagonists Emma Cole and Leo Craig (you must choose one at the outset, though both come with a range of preset customisation options) before being whisked away to a fantastical world among the clouds. There’s a sense of cheerful ceremony to it all, heightened by the way the first level assembles itself in front of you before letting you stroll inside.
Sadly, when the strolling begins, so too do our concerns. The presentation is uneven: imaginative background details abound, but your close surroundings are strangely empty, feeling flat even as the floor undulates underfoot. There’s little joy in the running and jumping, while the combat is as dull as the camera is clumsy. Every so often a group of nondescript shades will spawn, and one of the most efficient ways to deal with them is to leap on their heads.
There is, however, an alternative. Scattered around you’ll find power-ups (oddly, you first need to locate a key to unlock them) that see Emma or Leo don a new guise. It’s effectively a twist on Super Mario Odyssey’s capture mechanic, though here you can switch between three different outfits at once – with a deliberate delay that becomes mildly annoying. As in Odyssey, each one changes your locomotion or boosts your destructive capabilities in some way, yet the results are generally underwhelming. The designs may be cute, but a cloud that floats along and rides updraughts is hardly new, even if it looks like a sheep. There’s a wolf with a familiar-looking spin attack and a bat with a homing attack that can bounce off enemies and hovering objects to gain more air just like Sonic. The Elastiplant ability, meanwhile, is just a poor man’s version of Odyssey’s Uproots.
There’s the kernel of an good idea in the way these power-ups function not only effectively as extra lives but as ways to access hidden areas in previous worlds – often you need them to reach the golden Balan statues that are your train fare to new destinations, though the execution often requires little more than turning a key in a lock (or, in the case of the Gear Prince outfit, rotating a cog to move a platform into position). It’s summed up by your occasional encounters with the mysterious Balan himself: find him and it appears you’re getting the chance to play as him, which is only true for the duration of a simple QTE. In the end, it comes down to the difference between a magician and a showman – at heart, Balan Wonderworld feels like a lot of presentational curlicues straining to dress up a pretty basic parlour trick.
There’s little joy in the jumping, while the combat is as dull as the camera is clumsy