Ballance
Ballance is a relaxing action/puzzle Mad Marble Maze computer game for windows, where you control a ball, trying to get it to the exit across 15 levels which are ensembles of wooden platforms, metal rails and wooden gutters. Of course, since your "hero" is a ball, you don't walk, but rather roll around - and you better watch out for inertia, as the levels are built with No OSHA Compliance and you can easily slip and fall into the colorful void around. There are a lot of puzzles to solve by figuring out the right directions for your ball to take.
Physics play an important role in the game: by running into special "material changers", your ball can assume one of three different materials, each of them having a different weight:
- Paper: Being the lightest has its privileges - you can zoom easily across pits, make use of floor fans, and climb steep slopes - but your journey will be brutally interrupted when you come across any sort of obstacle, since you won't be able to push it out of the way.
- Wood: The average ball. It can negotiate its way up most slopes and push some obstacles out of the way; but it still cannot do some things.
- Stone: The heaviest one, and thus some gaps and slopes are impassable for it - but it can push heavy objects such as bridges, switches or other stone balls which inexplicably happen to lie around and block your way.
Tropes used in Ballance include:
- Check Point
- Crate Expectations: Who scattered all these crates throughout the levels?
- Floating Platforms: Not all. Some are set up on incredibly long poles that seem to reach down hundreds of kilometres onto the planet in the void below.
- Flying Saucer: Pops up in the ending.
- Fragile Speedster: Paper
- Jack of All Stats: Wood
- Mad Marble Maze
- Mighty Glacier: Stone
- Score Screen
- Vent Physics: Fans to propel the paper ball upwards.
- Wreaking Havok