Mobile Game of the Week: Badland (iOS)
On the surface, Badland is just another physics-based platformer starring a cute creature and a simple control scheme. But before you immediately move on to a more “serious” game, you should know something: Badland has something special going for it. It is a game that exists for one and only one purpose: creating simple moments of joyful realization for its players. Thanks to the game’s excellent design and disarming sense of whimsy, those moments of revelation come continuously throughout the game’s entirety.
In Badland, you play as an adorable little circular creature who lives and floats across a post-human world of overgrown organic matter and spinning gears. What you learn from the very first level is that the world of Badland is a dangerous place. The player has no defense against falling rocks, spinning spikes and hanging mines, other than to carefully float across the side-scrolling landscape and try to make it to the other side. Fortunately, getting from Point A to Point B has never been so fun.
The world of Badland isn’t all doom and gloom though—it’s also full of humor and wonder, which you will quickly discover as you watch your little creature frantically bounce around the environments. Most of the objects and obstacles in the foreground appear as silhouettes, while the backgrounds are bright and detailed. It’s an increasingly trendy look for sidescrollers, but in Badland it’s done well and probably hides what would have been some blurry textures. Sound design is the final thing to note about what an incredible job developer Frogmind has done at establishing the feel of this world. There is no music in Badland—just the sound of you bumping against various object, flies buzzing around the scene, and various other atmospheric sounds echoing through the scenes.
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