Ballance | PC Review

Do you have fond memories of Marble Madness? Do you enjoy platformers with some puzzles thrown in? Do you enjoy paying very little for a game that could provide approximately 8 hours of fun? If you answered yes to any of these questions, Ballance is a game for you! Originally released in 2004 by Atari Games, Ballance has been re-released on Steam for $5.99 granting a cheap option for hours of enjoyment.

Story? No, You Do What Marbles Do

There is no story to find here. You have an objective: Get to the end of the level by traversing obstacles, jumps, traps, rails, and other events. You begin the first level of Ballance as a wooden marble. This marble is relatively easy to control and is the medium weighted marble out of the three options. The wooden marble can push objects, but you either have to push the object multiple times or get a rolling start. There are transforming stations, as required in the early stages, but as tricks or red herrings in later stages, which can transform your marble into a wad of paper which is super lightweight and able to be blown into the air by fans. It’s also not a perfect circle, so you won’t move in a straight line with it. Finally, you can transform into a stone marble which is the heaviest and is used for brute force removal of obstacles and opening paths. Considering the weight of the stone marble, it is harder to stop or change direction quickly.

There are twelve levels to explore. Each level is more difficult and longer than the previous one. Out of my ten or eleven hours of play (I “died” a lot, others will probably be better than me), I spent six of them on the last two levels. Even with a perfect run, they would probably take 15 minutes to get through. Ballance makes you think and consider your moves. Sometimes your decisions leave you in areas that you cannot get out of besides purposefully rolling off the edge and starting over at the beginning of the level OR at a checkpoint which are spread throughout each level. There is a meaningless timer. I never once even came close to running out of time. I decided that the timer was more meant for the scoring event at the end of each level. You also have a number of lives at the beginning of each level. There are free guys here and there to help you along your way. Once you’ve defeated a level, you begin the next level with a predetermined number of marbles.

The Environment Will Lure You In

Ballance is a twenty year old game. I played it on my laptop which has a 15” monitor. With the game in full screen, it was a bit pixel-y and some edges were somewhat polygonal. That is not a bad thing. Instead, I felt transported into my younger years of PC gaming.

Myst immediately came to mind between the graphic style, color palette, and music. I was hooked. The music is mystical (no pun intended) and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Some music queues and samples were reminiscent of 90s sci-fi or horror movies. I loved the environment and loved my time playing and listening. Each marble type made a unique noise as it traveled.

The level design is impressive. As I arrived at the later levels, I couldn’t help but be blown away by the magnitude and by what I presume was hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of effort being put into creating this world.

The “puzzle” portion of this platformer-puzzle game comes into play when you have to make decisions between pushing pre-set marbles either out of your way OR down a ramp/rail so that it will push a button or remove an obstacle that you won’t arrive at for another minute or two. There were times where I missed these cues, arrived at the obstacle that I could no longer move, and had to fall off on purpose so that I could restart and know which decisions I had to make on the next run. I would also enter areas of the level too soon. On my next run, I knew to go in the other direction first to push a lever or tilt a teeter-totter device in the other direction before going back and finishing that area of the level. If I had one wish, I would have liked a more robust zoom out option AND an option to pan in any direction to plan my steps. I’ll grant that the developers knew these wishes would eliminate some of the challenges to this wonderful game.

A smaller screen (eg, a Steam Deck) with a more confined pixel footprint will definitely smooth the edges and crisp up the graphics. Even when my laptop tried starting the game in a smaller gaming window, I could see the difference. I wanted the bigger screen to be more immersed.

A fun little aside, each level is parked over a planet. In order to beat most levels, you have to knock obstacles out of your way. I laughed from time to time thinking about the inhabitants of those planets as the obstacles I’m removing from my marble escapade are falling to the ground. You might be technically in space, but gravity works here.

Mechanics and Adjustments

As mentioned above, Ballance is a twenty year old game and it doesn’t appear that any changes were made to the original in this port. My game started in German and since the menu prompts were in a foreign language, I had to use Google Translate. Marbles can’t talk, so there isn’t any dialogue in the game. Therefore, I just left it in German. However, as I got farther into the game, I wanted to see if those instructions would be helpful, particularly in the controls. I started the game from the Steam Library and selected the option “Play App Config Tool” which opened a simple Command Line interface. You know, the black screen with white text? (Type CMD in your Windows bar if you need a personal example.) This option offers one prompt: Which language. BAM! Switched it to English. As feared, I already knew all of the controls. The game was just getting harder.

Playing on the laptop, I used the arrows to control the marble movements. The space bar zoomed out but rarely enough to be helpful. I could hold the Shift key and press the left or right arrow to change the camera perspective; think Lakitu if he had a side hustle with marbles instead of Mario. These simple controls are all you need.

As if still playing on my old Hewlett Packard with Windows XP installed, I came across some bugginess. When I paused the game, sometimes the laptop would go to sleep. When that happened and I would return, the game window was gone. When I clicked on the icon in the taskbar, the window would pop back up but it was shrunk to a 2 inch x 2 inch unplayable window. I had to right click the icon in the taskbar and click “Close Window” which, funny enough, would return the game to the full screen. Don’t let these minor inconveniences deter you! Instead, enjoy the nostalgia while appreciating how far we have come in gaming.

Final Verdict

Despite those minor inconveniences, I loved my time with this game. Even during my frustration of the last two levels, I was eager to come back for more. I wanted to beat the game. Ballance does a great job of convincing you that you can do it while also making sure that you try hard, stay patient, and keep focused.

Honestly, who can argue with $6? It is so much fun and you only need to play the levels that you want. I will give a tiny spoiler and say that there is nothing unlockable by beating the game. So, if you’d rather just play the easier levels, there is nothing wrong with that. Play the game and love it like I did!

To hear me talk more about Ballance, be sure to listen to the January 17 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast.

This review is based on a PC copy of Ballance provided by Uber Strategist for coverage purposes. It is exclusive to this platform.