Balan's design was better than his whole game…

The visual design of the game was overall pretty good. The tragedy with Balan is that it has all the ingredients to make a properly good game, but is utterly lacking in direction. It feels like if the developers and artists were all ordered to do specific stuff and proceeded to do just that, but were kept completely in the dark about what meaning their work had in the greater picture and how it all fit together and the result is a disjointed mess that ends up as less than the sum of its parts instead of more.