Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc.
Kula World

But what do you think a beach ball is? What problems could it cause? At most, you might have to retrieve it from the sea, at most it might fall off the balcony and you'll have to go down and get it, at most it might land on the bum of some girl walking along the shore but there it actually creates an opportunity to strike up a conversation…

Well, if you say so, it means you've never played "Kula World," a crazy puzzle game for PlayStation that everyone remembers for its difficulty. Released in 1998, I had a demo with some levels, I tried to ask for it as a gift in 2000 but it wasn't available anymore, so I only got to play it in 2017 on my laptop thanks to an emulator, allowing me to confirm its difficulty but also to get excited for having completed all 150 ordinary levels without using any tutorials on YouTube, though not without quite a few curses.

A multicolored inflatable beach ball, different in every world, has to roll in a complex system of blocks suspended in the void to find a series of keys to unlock the exit (a large X that must be made to flash green), and it has to do so within a rather limited time frame. The ball clearly has movement limitations: it always moves forward along the same face, can turn right and left while staying on the same face, and can jump forward two "squares" to reach another block - on the same plane or a lower one - but cannot move onto perpendicular side faces, only when it reaches an edge can it continue on the perpendicular front face and only when it reaches a square base can it move from there to any section. This limitation means the player literally has to open their brain to figure out how to move. How can I reach that key over there? What path must I take to reach that block? From what point and side should I jump? And now how do I get back? In the player's mind, they must reconstruct the grid as seen from all perspectives and imagine all the possible movements of the ball. Surely it is not an uneducational game; there is always discussion about the negative influence video games can have on young people, leading them to aggression and unreality, I remember that the older and bigoted would shoot real sentences against the world of video games based on no reasoning but only prejudice; for them, video games were pure foolishness with no extenuating circumstances, a real factory of monsters; this title instead developed the mind at 360°, particularly developing a sense of orientation, position, perspective, and three-dimensionality, as well as psychologically an attitude to see reality from different positions; from an educational point of view, I believe it could be judged exactly in the opposite way that video games are still seen today (after all, those were the years when newspapers reported on thousands of copies of "Resident Evil 2" being pulled from the market for excessively violent content).

But the game had a double or perhaps multiple difficulty, it was doubly diabolical or perhaps more: if the meticulousness and the limited time (only partially extendable by collecting hourglasses along the way) weren't enough, a series of tremendous obstacles were added to the path that made the game cooler but also very treacherous. From flying mines to spikes shooting up from the ground, passing through sharp whirlpools that jump up to pills that slow the game, but the main problem is the blocks themselves on which the ball must walk: those that are fragile and shatter at a mere touch, those that are fiery where you can only linger for a millisecond, those that are icy where the ball slides without joystick control (even to the point of plummeting into the chasm), those that move like platforms on which you have to jump with the right timing, those that are invisible that the player must identify through intuition to jump on them and not into the ditch; thus creating yet another puzzle, the player must figure out how to jump, when, and in what sequence. An additional challenge is represented by the teleportation devices and laser beams, which often work alternatively, one turns on and another off, creating a sort of additional colored electric maze, and here the player finds themselves fiddling with the respective colored switches that activate and deactivate them, to move to the next platform in the case of teleportation devices and not get electrocuted in the case of lasers. Another element designed to create confusion is the directional arrows located on some blocks, once reached they force the ball to continue in the indicated direction, making the choice of path on the grid even more difficult.

But the creators went even further by testing the player's patience and dedication: you can't save at the end of each level, it can only be done after a certain number of levels, and this further drives people mad; it's already difficult to pass a level and you don't know if you'll manage to do it again the next time, plus if you lose all points you don't even get the advantage of being able to start again from that level, you're forced to repeat, perhaps struggling again, some previous levels; in all honesty… "what a pain!"

So how can we define "Kula World"? A "multi-puzzle," a sum of puzzles, a puzzle within a puzzle, a "patience-breaker," "the devil's mazes," one can indulge in fantasy to define this traumatic game.

Yet it was truly beautiful, truly enchanting in all its mix of elements, we might even say it was more enjoyable to experience it as a spectator than as a first-person player, always assuming there was some real video game wizard on the joystick. Just think of the graphics, which were truly spectacular and seemed unaffected by time, being sharp and detailed. As a color lover, I say the kaleidoscope of colors it offered was an impressive calling card. After a certain number of levels, one would then witness a change of setting, there was the Egyptian and desert one, the foggy one, the purple and dark one, the icy one, the nocturnal and rocky one, the oriental one, each setting was endowed with its magic. But the colors shone the most in the bonus levels - accessed after collecting five fruits - levels where the aim was to light up all the blocks in a limited time to significantly increase the score (in the case of capture, fall, or time out, you gained nothing): these were real psychedelic mazes with strong, hallucinogenic multicolor lights, they seemed like a disco suspended in the void, with electronic music and lsd pills really creating a rave atmosphere, it was lovely to see the blocks go from purple to the brightest yellow.

And the music was also of high level, hovering between ambient, electronic, and world, it significantly contributed to making the atmosphere more psychedelic than ever.

Then there is an aspect of the game that can be called anachronistic: the score. The score was a feature of the 80s games, from the old Nintendo era, in that era we found it in any type of game, even where it was less useful, such as in adventure platforms; the 90s and the new generation literally retired it but within a puzzle game it acquires a meaning, so collecting coins, gems, fruits and saving time is an extra challenge for the player, who can thus compete with themselves, not surprisingly there is also a time mode. But given the difficulty of the game, it makes one think that most players didn't really bother trying to gather records, just persisting to move forward with the levels was an enormous effort that didn't encourage taking on additional burdens.

So despite all the associated curses, the game was ultimately a masterpiece of rare beauty, colorful, psychedelic, hypnotic, enigmatic, and annoying, a mix of elements certainly created to remain in memory, not in the shadows.