Tims do not earn points while you’re actively playing stages, and as there is nothing even remotely entertaining to do in the overworld, it quickly begins to feel like watching paint dry.
Feeding Tims makes them play on structures which slowly earns points towards unlocking bits and pieces in the overworld including more structures for them to play on and a giant clock face floating in the sky above called the “Clock of happiness” that I’ve yet to find any purpose for, as it doesn’t even tell time.
Tims -small, colourful, and fuzzy blob-like creatures with bird beaks or rabbit/bear ears -hatch from collected eggs in the overworld between stages, with the gems being used to feed them. There are also gemstones and Tim eggs scattered around each stage, which respawn each time you enter the level. This means if you want to see the credits roll you’ll be forced to do at least a bit of backtracking, as otherwise, you won’t have the required amount to unlock the final boss fight. Many statues are unobtainable until you’ve returned with costumes from later levels that have the required abilities to do so. Each stage has a handful of Balan statues to find, which act as this game’s main collectibles that are required to progress. If that sounds tedious, it’s because it is and it sucks.Įach of the twelve levels initially has two stages to complete (with a third being unlocked in postgame), as well as a boss fight. This leads to having to constantly swap between costumes to ensure the costume you’re about to pick up is also the one in the third slot, so you can store copies of it while also continuing to be able to use it to progress through the stage. If you have three costumes and collect another costume gem, then your rightmost costume displayed in the HUD is stored in the closet while the costume you are wearing is pushed down to the next slot. Otherwise, you’re forced to find one of the checkpoints in each stage, stand on it for a second, then walk into a costume closet that spawns, where you can select any of the costumes you’ve collected from any level, pending you have copies of them banked. You can carry up to three costumes at a time (including duplicates), and while you can swap between those three on the fly, there is a short-but-still-too-long animation that plays every time you do so. Keys and costumes respawn over time, which is good because should you fall or take any damage you’ll lose the costume you’re currently wearing, which more often than not means tedious backtracking. These keys are almost always placed mere feet away from each costume’s gem, meaning they serve practically no purpose other than to slow your progress for what amounts to essentially seconds. Each costume is contained inside a locked gem, which requires a generic consumable key to open.
Each level has a set of costumes with unique abilities to find, based on the various characters seen dancing (for unexplained reasons) around each stage. At its core, Balan Wonderworld is a basic 3D platformer that unsuccessfully tries to create a mashup of Mario Odyssey’s character swapping mechanics with Sonic the Hedgehog-like characters.
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