💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › ballance.gmi captured on 2024-06-20 at 11:52:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Ballance is a level-based puzzle game. The player has to move a ball through a hovering maze of paths and rails.
A classic game, originally released in Europe in 2004, and re-released on Steam and GOG just this year. As a kid I caught glimpses of it on my uncle's computer, and was mystified by it, but that memory was sealed and buried deeply until I saw the re-release. I had to buy this game and see what it was actually like.
Yes, Ballance is great, although it's a bit less of a puzzle game, and more of a relaxing walk through a mystical world... until you get impatient or lose balance one too many times and have to start over. The game relies heavily on physics, with the player-controlled ball transforming between three materials: wood is standard; stone is heavier and has more pushing power but is hard to steer due to momentum; paper is too lightweight to push anything but can float in the air. The puzzles are not difficult, but execution is important: you are tempted to use your momentum to go faster and perhaps cut some corners, but doing this without falling off the rails can take a bit of skill.
Anyway, some people have said it's boring, but I liked it.
The graphics are very "of their time", that mid 2000s era of computer software, where the tech optimism of the 90s is replaced by the more nuanced idea of computers providing "*experiences*". Ballance is peak Windows XP. Ominous ambient music, realistic textures plastered on oddly simple geometric shapes, glowing particle effects everywhere...
Maybe I'm just nostalgic. In any case, I think the aesthetic fits Ballance perfectly, since the game is slow and rewards patience.
I must say though, this "re-release" had seemingly no work put into it compared to the original game, so there is no widescreen support, and the language must be set with an external config tool. However, due to its cult following, there are mods available for widescreen support. There was also a glitch where rotating the camera would get registered as a move command, and I could not figure out how to fix it.
Ballance Widescreen Fix on PCGamingWiki
This is the really frustrating part, in the end I probably spent as much time trying to get the game to work on Linux as I did actually playing it. But, my attempts were unsuccessful (I won't dwell on them here, see my WineHQ App Database report if you're curious), so I ended up just booting into Windows instead.
Ballance on WineHQ App Database
Of course, the game runs very smoothly on modern hardware: they could have updated the graphics with this re-release, but IMO that would lose a big part of the game's charm.
gardenapple - 2024-04-16