Joe Wander and the Enigmatic Adventures: good quality game, but with an imbalance of its mechanics

The platform genre is a classic that many video game players know and many have their favorites. It was one of the most common types of games that all platforms of the past had and that a good part of them always tried to bring new things to freshen up the players.

”Joe Wander and the Enigmatic Adventures” arrives in modern times promising challenging puzzles and a 3D platform format. It’s a very interesting mix, but how does the game offer these mechanics to the player?

Welcome to the jungle (and other worlds)

Right from the start, “Joe Wander” makes a good presentation with an introduction scene showing the protagonist arriving at a location and, when trying to get a ruby, he is pulled into a portal and ends up in the first world of the adventure.

It’s simple but it already shows the visual part and the character that the player will control very efficiently. Despite being one more voiceless protagonist, you can see that the developers were very careful with the visual part to give the game a lot of charisma.

All scenarios are visually very rich with a lot of detail for grass, sand, water and even snow. It’s a very beautiful game to look at, considering its scope, and the water reflections are quite eye-catching. It is eye-popping, both for the player and their audience.

Altogether, in the game you have to go through four worlds and they all have enemies and themes to make the content more varied. Each of them has a fixed number of stages: There are five stages in all, with a special stage to collect a cosmetic and the final boss of the world.

And speaking of cosmetics, “Joe Wander” has a good variation of visuals for the character and if the player is interested, he can complete the challenges in the game and collect more than what is available each time he completes a world. The different visuals can also deliver great interaction with the audience, as they are fun and achieved after a lot of sweat and good laughs.

The game’s music is good and, in general, fits well to the moments in which the player will find himself.

Imbalance ahead

And then we need to talk about gameplay. The controls are very responsive and the character responds well to any command changes. Overall, this shouldn’t present any problems for the player.

But the game uses physics that leans more towards something more realistic and in the first two worlds it’s something very good to see. Moving objects on slopes, water, wind and even colliding with objects is very fun and exciting.

In its main objective, “Joe Wander” offers puzzles that start out very simple and increase in complexity as the player advances through the worlds, and thus, the game tries to balance these two parts of puzzle moments and platform moments until the end of the journey. It’s really fun, because the gameplay is fun and the world has a lot of charisma, it’s really exciting to explore what the game has to offer.

However, this balance is overthrown after the end of the second world and, upon reaching the third, a peak of difficulty is noticed until the end that can become exhausting.

As I mentioned earlier, each world has its theme and also its enemies. In the third world, an extremely agile enemy is presented, with long-range attacks that make it difficult to eliminate him, making it necessary to opt for unconventional methods to overcome this obstacle, such as using a box as a shield doing with the player losing more time to solve some part of a game phase and reach a checkpoint.

Not only the enemies, the platform parts and the puzzles also begin to suffer from this exponential increase in difficulty, such as, for example, the mechanic of hanging and swinging at certain points of the stages using the rope that the character carries with him, which activation hitbox for this precise mechanic requires the character to be very close to that point.

There’s also the issue of how fragile the solutions to the puzzles are, as they aren’t stored with any checkpoints. And in case you end up dying during their solution, the whole process needs to be done again. At the beginning this is not a big problem, but from the middle of the game forward, the puzzle and platform sections get longer and redoing them ends up making the process tedious, especially in the last world, that has slippery ice physics.

It is also important to mention that some puzzles seem not to have been properly cared for and that the execution is hampered, as in the case of puzzles that use a metal sphere which, due to physics, can make the player waste a lot of time trying to solve it, especially the that simulates a pinball table.

The end of Joe Wander is not for everyone

Unfortunately, in his final act, “Joe Wander” also messes up with the challenge against the last boss, which is extremely long, has many steps to complete in order to defeat him and because there is no checkpoint during the process, any errors can take the player to the start of the challenge.

A curiosity is that the final challenge had different types of platforms in early versions of the game, but that the developers modified to make the fight against the final boss more challenging. I believe that the most correct move here would be to make such difficulty modifications to the more challenging modes already present in the game.

Finally, the game offers extra modes after completing it, which can bring more content to those who liked it and want to overcome more challenges, and can also keep their audience attentive while the streamer completes the challenges.

As you can already see, “Joe Wanderer” can be quite fun for anyone who wants to play it livestreaming. There’s great potential to amuse audiences a lot and get attention by having all that charisma and good looks. There are also times when physics generates flying objects and even characters can be thrown high, generating moments for good laughs.

The version I played is the Playstation 5 and didn’t have any performance and execution issues, except for a brief part of the game where there was a drop in the frame rate, but it wasn’t a difficult part.

The game in its latest version has localization for several languages, always something important for a wide variety of streamers.

Katsutoshi