0.5/5 ★ – Lammy's review of BALAN WONDERWORLD.

Balan Wonderworld post-Main Credits review: This game makes me angry. I've played bad video games before, but this one is is special. Balan Wonderworld is allegedly a platformer made by Sonic creator and securities fraud committer Yuji Naka. There's... no plot to speak of. You're a kid, Balan is a hat man, and you go through levels. The levels are all based on people being sad, and I think you make them happy by beating the level boss. The whole game smacks of a lack of effort. The level designs are simple and bland, with collectibles strewn about with some care in the beginning of the game and almost randomly later on. The main mechanic is a costume based power up system; you can collect up to 80 costumes, each of which give your nameless protag a special power. Without a costume, they can do essentially nothing, and each costume vanishes permanently when hit once. The game binds every button save the analog sticks to one single action, unique for each costume. On some costumes it's an attack, and in others it's... jumping. Yeah, the game takes away your jump about half the time. There's also QTE challenges called Balan Bouts that you need to do FRAME PERFECTLY to get a collectible. This challenge is repeated essentially identically 48 total times. Music's okay, and there's a Chao Garden-esque "Island of Tims" that serves no purpose except gating the 80th costume. I'm not going into a TON of detail on any one aspect of the game because they're generally all bad. This game feels like a tax write off or pyramid scheme; there's just enough going on to fool you into thinking this is a real video game if you don't look too close. Meanwhile Yuji Naka collects your $60 and insider trades with it, laughing all the way. As an aside, I played on Switch, which made a lot of the performance issues WAY rougher and the QTE's almost impossible. Don't buy this. Don't play it. It's not a game worth even morbid curiosity. Let it gather dust 1/10, it runs but I wish it didn't.