Reviewed on: Nintendo Switch

I don’t know about you, but this writer loves math and logic/math puzzles… So imagine my surprise when I discovered Energy Balance, a game about number puzzles! Unfortunately the game’s premise is the best thing about it, because the execution is certainly far from an acceptable level of quality.

Narrative: 6

Despite being a puzzle game, Energy Balance has a story mode. We follow the story of an intergalactic traveler whose ship has technical problems, and who needs to fix the vehicle’s systems to make it home. Repairing the ship’s damaged mechanisms is done by solving the game’s number puzzles.

The narrative passages are presented in static panels, very similar to each other, with a caption showing the pilot’s monologues and her ramblings while talking to the cat that accompanies her on the trip.

Mechanics: 3

The premise of the game’s puzzles is quite simple and appealing: place the numbers so that their sums equal the values specified for some rows and columns. The first few minutes of play are pleasant, showing the game’s logic and mechanics: you can swap any 2 numbers, regardless of whether they are neighbors or in the same row or column – basically, any move is valid.

But the problems show up in the very first levels: the difficulty curve grows explosively! Soon you will have so many numbers, rows, columns and results to manage that you won’t be able to organize a tactic to approach the challenge. There were countless ways to mitigate the growth in difficulty, such as offering more repeated pieces or even offering more pieces in “free” spaces (that take part in none of the rows/columns used for results)… But the game gives you no time to get used to it, to develop a technique for solving the puzzles – instead, it buries you in information that you need to fully absorb and keep in mind at every moment if you want any chance of finding a logical solution.

Yes, it is possible to make some random moves and see whether you seem closer to or further from the answer… But clearly this is not the right way to play Energy Balance – and unfortunately the game doesn’t help you figure out what that way would be.

The controls are quite “raw”. You move the cursor using the directional buttons, select a piece with A (it lights up slightly, but is hard to see) and then select another by pressing A to swap them… And that’s it. The Switch version supports the touchscreen, but it doesn’t help much, as the game doesn’t allow you to “drag” a piece to the one it should swap with – you must tap both pieces to swap, and the effect on the selected piece (lit up) is very hard to see.

Each level is a layout, a map for pieces. The smartest part of the game’s design comes from the fact that each time you pick the same puzzle, although the board shape is the same, there are new numbers and results to work with. The game also features Hardcore modes and a full-square mode – as if there were a need to make everything even harder!

Audiovisual: 3

The whole game screams eccentricity. Not only because of the monologues that make little sense, but because of the look that tries to seem watercolor and impressionist, the design of the pilot and her cat Meowie, and the “music” playing in the background (10-second percussion loops, constantly repeated across menus and levels), which creates the strange discomfort of a brilliant but disturbed mind wandering alone through space.

The background image seems to be the same for all levels, and the minimalism in the use of visual effects not only makes the game unattractive: it reduces usability and accessibility.

Final thoughts

Energy Balance is the perfect example of a good idea poorly executed. The visuals and sounds are not very inspired, there is no learning curve, there is no smart design to help the player understand what they are doing and what must be done… And it simply doesn’t feel like a video game, just a very hard newsstand magazine puzzle.

Score

Narrative = 6

Mechanics = 3

Audiovisual = 3

Overall: 4

Nintendo Switch version