Balan Wonderworld has come and gone fairly quickly, and hasn’t left a massive impact in its wake. We weren’t big fans of the game, and day one issues revolving around potential epileptic seizures didn’t help. In a strange turn, Square Enix has announced it will be pulling the demo from digital storefronts - starting today.
The demo itself signalled the first problems for the game, with many criticising its controls and visuals. While Square Enix did say it couldn't solve every problem, a day one patch was promised to address some problems players had. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to stop the game receiving a pretty poor critical reception - despite what some suspicious user scores on Metacritic have stated.
It’s not clear why the demo is being pulled, but it could be due to the poor reception the game has received from critics and fans alike. The trial would also unlock a special costume, which a translated tweet from the official Twitter account has promised will be available to everyone at a later date.
If you’re invested in game preservation, or just want to have a stab at the game before it goes, you only have a few hours left to download it before it’s gone forever. The demo has a selection of levels to try, and roughly two hours worth of content to delve into. You’ll get to try a variety of costumes, see numerous worlds and explore the hub area, The Isle of Tims. There’s undoubtedly some fans of the game out there, so you never know, this could be an underrated gem for you. Maybe....
Will you be grabbing the demo before it’s delisted? Let us know in the comments below.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 3
Call me a cynic, but something tells me the demo would be staying right where it is if Balan Wonderworld had reviewed favourably... 🤔
Great day for the world. The fewer people subjected to it the better for us all!
I don't know why they didn't pull it after the first weekend. It did the OPPOSITE of what demos are supposed to do. They could've gotten MORE sales, without a demo, just from people blindly picking it up & hoping it would be as good as Billy Hatcher/NiGHTS 2/Blinx the Time Sweeper/Rodea the Sky Soldier/anything else Naota Oshima & Yuji Naka have done post-Sonic. Instead, the demo showed everybody that nah, this is WAY WORSE than anything those games did badly. Instead, by putting out the demo, they showed people like me (who IS a fan of Blinx and Billy Hatcher) that Balan is a turd that should be avoided at all costs.
It's just crazy to me to see any contrarian voices out there for this one, supporting it for some reason. I've seen a handful of youtubers DETERMINED to try and salvage the "good name" of Balan Wonderworld - the platformer that doesn't even understand how fundamentally important it is that your character should be able to jump at any time. Even My Life in Gaming was streaming this the other day and questioning if this is really that bad (though they did correctly mention that weird effect where people who hate a thing stop talking about it, but the people who convince themselves they love it don't, so over time a false positive reputation may appear for something like this as those wack-a-doos try to turn it into a "cult classic," ugh). Some people are capable of some truly crazy mental gymnastics, boy. It's kind of been fascinating watching this all play out, to be honest. Much more interesting than Square's last two complete misfires, The Quiet Man and Left Alive.
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