![]() ![]() Perhaps a smaller but even more influential idea is introduced not as a world gimmick but a consistent feature, that being that some blocks in a stage only become available after you have placed others. Eventually they will all be featured together in the final world, but by then you would have learned how to handle them well enough separately this can serve as a solid finale to the work featured elsewhere. These include things like the glass blocks that will fracture if too many other blocks are placed atop them, burning blocks that will disappear if they touch another one that’s on fire, and blocks that will completely invert gravity the moment they’re placed, but by cordoning them off into a world that fully explores them, you’re free to mostly focus on how these new elements influence the stack-building play. Art of Balance does start you off with just stacking wooden blocks to keep things simple and help you find your footing, but in each of the worlds, the game will introduce some new concern that becomes that world’s focus. The only minor disruption I could find to how blocks held together or behaved was in a very late game stage where a glass block, after gravity was inverted, would lightly clip into another block, but the arrangement would have already been doomed to fall without this small glitch and elsewhere things behaved reliably. The physics in Art of Balance are consistent and clean, the results of your work identical each time you attempt a specific action. Already there can be more than one arrangement to complete a level, but this somewhat lenient system for declaring success means there is some flexibility in how you can approach a stage without it completely erasing the difficulty since the countdown does take a full three seconds to resolve. Even if your tower is unstable or even in the process of tipping over, if the countdown completes before the blocks hit the water or fall outside the tub, you get credit for completing the level. The good news is that once all blocks are placed, a countdown starts that only needs to count to three before it considers your efforts a success. Levels are differentiated not only by the types of blocks provided for your building task but by the platform you’ll be building it on, the player having to consider how a less stable base can influence their work as well. ![]() However, there is a nice touch in the fact that every time you encounter a certain shape, the block will be the same size as last time, ensuring you can develop a gradual understanding of how different pieces interlock or balance each other out. There are some typical ones to be found, rectangles, circles, x-shapes, and half-circles, but there are some like a large arrow or dumbbell that will certainly require more than common sense to carefully integrate into the tiny towers you find yourself building. In a level of Art of Balance, a set of blocks will placed out in a line before you, the goal being to arrange them in a stable stack despite their sometimes strange shapes. ![]() Impressively though, even these added concepts don’t fracture the atmosphere. Even when the background changes across the 200 levels, you’re still in a quiet, simple space that looks like a slice of pleasant reality, so perhaps it might sound strange that eventually you’ll be using burning blocks to destroy others or even completely invert gravity to build upside-down stacks. ![]() Your work happens above a tub of water that catches the rays of sunlight coming in through the window just right, potted plants decorate in the background, and gentle tunes keep things meditative and comfy. With a gorgeous zen presentation, Art of Balance takes the sometimes nerve-wracking process of trying to balance a set of wooden blocks and transforms it into something calm and relaxing. ![]()
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