There’s no real exposition to it or any actual explanation as to why you’re doing it or how to even go about it. It is one of those games where you’re given the training wheels and held by the hand for a little while.
The game begins off serenely and calmly enough by abruptly starting you off with a simple enough GO COLLECT THINGS AND DON’T FUCK IT UP type of tutorial level… without actually explaining it’s a tutorial. You want decent graphics in a puzzle game and you’re really barking up the wrong genre in general. It’s perfunctory for the type of game it is, I mean.
I mean, particularly if you think about it like I just did. Yeah, it’s not the be all and end all of it, but seeing a pixellated background looking murky and dirty as you roll a Skegness beach ball around in the sky can be a bit off-putting. These are not backgrounds, they are jpeg picture plastered in the background and the quality of them is actually quite poor now. The backgrounds cannot be treated in the same way though. Presentation-wise, back in the day, this was actually a pretty solid example of how to do a puzzle game in 3D without looking like arse. There’s an odd mix of calming ditties and stirring, wind-coated beats interspersed with some rave elements in the bonus stages but none of it feels wrong or out of place. The ball, items and blocks look nice enough, even though there’s not a huge amount of detail to them, and the soundtrack complements the game very nicely. You’re bouncing about like a proper beach ball on blocks in the sky, following paths, traversing against gravity by rolling up the walls and upside down and wondering whether Isaac Newton is in fact rolling in his grave as he wonders quite what the fuck is even up with this shit.Ĭonsidering the game is 22 years old by now, the main look of the game is still reasonably good. That decade was weird…) and the concept is to traverse the sky-based landscapes finding fruit, coins, keys and the exit in order to receive an emboss-effect WELL DONE in the sky as you are taken to yet another sky-based maze in the sky for you to fall off of and suffer the consequences of LOST POINTS.Īnd that’s pretty much it. And although it fared pretty well when it was released, gaining a plethora of acclaimed reviews from different sources and whatnot, it is difficult to see what the appeal was.Įssentially, Kula World is a puzzle game taken place in the middle of the sky where you are a beach ball (I AM NOT FUCKING KIDDING YOU – because why would I be? It’s the 90s. Suffice to say that within no time at all, you will be immensely frustrated at Kula World, an early 3D puzzler from a Swedish developer for the original Playstation. When it doesn’t make sense… it’s purely to get YOU, the player into some other sort of bother. And when it does make sense, it’s purely to get YOU, the player, into some sort of bother. Kula World skims this line and treads the ground in between making sense and none at all. Unless your game is going for the opposite effect, then try to make sure that anything that happens actually happens because reality.
Game design 101: when designing a game, make sure that any and all physics make complete and utter sense.
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