Balloon Kid

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.

Game Boy • 1990 — 03/02/2026

Alice and Jim are two children living in a city where clouds float in the sky, skyscrapers are pencils (I swear — Wikipedia says it's called Pencilvania, and I hope that's true) and everyone spends their days having fun with balloons. The problem is that Jim, a bright but not-too-bright kid, decides to go overboard: he ties a whole bunch of balloons together and attaches himself to them... and so he starts floating away, carried off by the wind. It's up to Alice to go rescue her brother, drifting through eight levels with two balloons in hand (two was apparently enough to have a good time up in the sky).

The premise alone is enough to see where I'm going with this: Balloon Kid is simply fantastic. As far as I'm concerned, it represents everything I love in a platformer: the relative simplicity, the rounded and vibrant visuals, the incredibly gentle learning curve. You've probably gathered as much from my previous posts: I don't necessarily love a challenge in a platformer.

It's something I came to realize as an adult: I've never been particularly drawn to platformers where you need to nail a jump with pinpoint precision. Super Meat Boy is great, but — how shall I put it — it's probably not my thing. On the contrary, I find it delightful and almost therapeutic to guide these little characters through a colorful world I'd love to take a stroll in. My favorite Super Mario game is Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, after all — the easy one, thanks to the carrot power-up.

Balloon Kid shares a great deal of that philosophy (and I believe it shares a significant chunk of DNA with it). The controls are precise but not overly so, because at the end of the day this is a platformer where the protagonist can only do the following: float through the air holding her balloons, let go of the balloons to tackle very brief ground sections, and inflate new balloons to rise back into the green sky of the original Game Boy screen. No other actions: no shooting, no power-ups, and not many jumps. There are balloons and clouds, and obstacles like lightning bolts, little birds, and octopuses leaping out of the water, while the levels scroll from right to left — and Alice along with them.

I personally love Game Boy platformers because, with so few buttons available, developers have no way to overcomplicate things (often needlessly, though that depends on taste). It's the essence of the game that has to work well: the physics of the jump, the response time of attacks, the feel of acceleration when running. Balloon Kid, thankfully, completely nails its one great mechanic: floating through the sky. The first half of the game lets you move fast, and then, from level five onward, the game asks you to be precise. To measure the pressure on the A button (with which Alice adorably flaps her arms) and pass safely through increasingly complex — but not too complex — obstacles. There are also boss fights: three bonks on the head and off you go.

The game is moderately easy and can be finished in about an hour, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes. But we're talking about an hour in which we get to step into the shoes of a little girl holding on to balloons, crossing a world of pencil-skyscrapers, temples, scattered thunderstorms, mountains and oceans to rescue her little brother — braving fate, wind, rain and little birds. It's a gentle hour.

If Balloon Kid has one great quality, it's this: it reminds players that you don't always need to push, rush, or optimize. Sometimes it's enough to stay suspended for just the right amount of time, trust the breeze, and hold tight to your two balloons.