Game EXP: Game With Balls (NS2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Game With Balls through Keymailer, a third-party company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game key was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that it be played, and content be created.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Game With Balls
Systems: Steam OS, Linux, Nintendo Switch 1 & 2
Release Date: April 6, 2026
Publisher: Sumatras Studio
Developer: Geert Verhoef
Time Spent: 2-3 Hours

When I first saw Games With Balls, I was excited for what I hoped the game would be.  When I saw that the game was controlled using the gyroscope in the Switch Joy-Cons, I was thrilled because, apart from using the Joy-Cons like traditional motion controls, I feel like there are not enough novel uses of the gyroscope that aren't centered around aiming a weapon.  There's the game Give me toilet paper, and that's just a Joy-Con in the center of a roll of toilet paper, and I honestly can't think of any others off the top of my head.  Maybe WarioWare: Move It!, but I've only played a handful of the minigames.  There's also Myahm Agana Shrine in Breath of the Wild.  But this is the kind of novelty that I would love to see more of, even if it's not directly from Nintendo.  A game that uses real-world pictures as the basis for a Labyrinth toy-type game.  Game with Balls is that game.

Before we get into the weeds, I should preface that this review is specifically for the Nintendo Switch release, which is playable on both the Switch and the Switch 2.  I saw on the game's Steam page that there are additional challenge modes, which include Breakout, a Pac-Man-type game, air hockey, and possibly others.  Unless there are unlockable challenge modes after you complete some/more/all of the levels, I cannot confirm if they are available on the Switch.  So now is the time to bring up that I was not able to complete this game, at least for the moment.

In the Switch version of the game, there are five different themes for the marble labyrinths.  "Crafted" is your traditional wooden labyrinth, consisting of a maze, and after the second stage, is filled with holes to gobble up your little marble.  The difficulty of solving the labyrinth itself is not the real challenge here, but instead, is navigating around the holes that, at times, feel like they're annoyingly everywhere.  In the eighth stage, there isn't so much a labyrinth with walls as it's a labyrinth with holes.  I decided to move on from "Crafted" after the 11th stage for no other reason than to explore the other stages, although based on some of the images from the trailer, I'm a little terrified of some of the later stages.

The second group of stages is titled "Drawn."  These start out as more traditional mazes, but then morph into moving around a space filled with non-traditional walls and barriers.  Some of the mazes are more focused on design and the look of the maze rather than the maze in one stage being significantly more difficult than the maze in an earlier stage.  I did finish all of the "Drawn" stages because of how calming they were compared to the later "Crafted" stages.  Along with the music that was introduced in these stages, I felt like I could enter a zen state and just enjoy the digitization of the physical art that was created for this game.  Just moving my little marble through these stages was nice, in the Christopher Lee sense of the word. 

Now would be a good time to bring up, as far as I can tell, an optional aspect of the game.  In each level, there are hidden stars to collect.  The level tells you ahead of time that there are X number of stars, anywhere between two and five (from the levels I've seen), often in out-of-the-way areas, hard-to-reach areas, or sometimes right behind the starting area, which you can easily miss if you only go forward.  Coupled with the timer, you could try to collect all of the stars in the fastest time possible, although the game only recognizes your overall fastest time.  So if you play a particularly large level and finish it with zero stars in 48.982 seconds, the game is going to remember that time versus if you collect all three stars in 4:23.877 seconds.  Sometimes I've felt compelled to hunt for stars if the level design looks like I can spot where I think a star could be hidden, but for other stages, reaching the goal is my primary target.

The third group of levels is called "History," although I'm not entirely sure why.  A handful of the early "History" levels are linear, although they're designed to trick your eye, getting you easily turned around if you're not paying close attention to which way you came and how the paths can loop back around and cross over the middle several times.  I ended up having to stop on level 10 because my ball got stuck in an area where it should not have been able to get stuck.  Kind of.  In my video, you can see the first one, where it seems like the marble is too big to fit between two lines.  The second one, the ball got stuck in a corner.  And since both of these happened within the first quarter of the labyrinth, I didn't want to invest 3-4 minutes just to have the marble get stuck/wedged between two lines and have to start over again.

The fourth group, "Redblue," is the best at telling from a video what is going on.  "Redblue" as a title is a reference to the old red and blue 3D glasses, a 173-year-old form of stereoscopic 3D effect in art called Anaglyph 3D.  I was pretty excited to play these 3D stages with my red/blue glasses, but when I started the first level, with an appropriate "3D" in the middle of the level, I was disappointed that there were no red/cyan colors to create the stereoscopic effect.  It wasn't until Level Seven, when I paused the game because my hands were shaking ever so slightly from failing for the last five minutes, that I discovered that there was an option to turn the red/blue effect on.  I sadly now cannot locate my red/blue glasses, as I thought I had put them with my copy of the original 13 Ghosts.

The last grouping of levels is titled "Mixed" for mixed media, and unlike the other four collections, this one contains only 13 levels, whereas all of the others have 20.  These levels felt closer to "Drawn" as each level was more about the visual aesthetic than the difficulty.  The first level was what looked like blue marker or paint on a bathroom tile.  Another level was a painting of a maze on an easel in a bedroom.  My absolute favorite was the cross-stitched pattern of a maze in a loop.  Just a traditional-looking maze, but the avenue through which the maze is delivered is what made that level memorable.  There were even two levels that used clay for the walls of the labyrinth, and the clay would actually slow the marble down if it came into contact with the walls.

I'm somewhat reluctant to call the entirety of Game With Balls a relaxing and casual game because there are some absolutely difficult levels in "Crafted" and "Redblue" that are anything but calming.  "Drawn" and "Mixed" feel like they were made for the pure enjoyment of visual art and mazes, and while I would like to include "History" with the latter group, being afraid to progress because of getting stuck put a damper on that one.  I would like to say that I will be finishing this game in its entirety, but I know that for some of the more difficult levels, I'll have to take my time and enjoy a game that's all about completing a labyrinth using the Switch in one of the more novel ways I've seen since the console was released.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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