Indie Time: Insane Balancing On One Leg In Extremely High Places

Insane Balancing On One Leg In Extremely High Places is a game with a self-explanatory name. It’s indie. It’s free. It has high scores. Do you need any more explaining than that?

Oh, all right.

The most striking thing about Insane Balancing On One Leg In Extremely High Places is the art style, a kind of psychedlic retro explosion on your screen. Beams from the sun pulse and rotate, characters and text bounce around the title screen like excited children, huge pixels dance to the chiptune soundtrack. While attempting to balance on one leg in the extremely high place of your choice, the whole world sways drunkenly, threatening to pitch you off the edge at any moment.

Despite all of this, actually playing can be a rather sedate affair. Most of the time you’ll be tilting to keep your balance, but eventually you’ll have to jump over birds or other nefarious things intent on knocking you from your perch. Jumping can be tricky because if you’re not well balanced you’ll fall to your doom instead of landing spryly on one leg like nothing happened. It’s also the only way to move around, so if you find yourself too close to a precipice, you can jump back towards the center if you’re careful. That’s pretty much it: balance, dodge things, collect the occasional coin, and try to stay alive long enough to make the high score.

There are only three stages: atop a skyscraper, on the roof of a mountain shack, and on a rocket hurtling through space. While those are pretty sweet, I feel like there are some other extremely high places that could have been included. How about a mountaintop, where you’d have to dodge hypothermia and low oxygen levels? Or what about famous landmarks, like an Egyptian pyramid or the leaning tower of Pisa? Or something more abstract, like balancing on a wave of euphoria while dodging negative thoughts that want to bring you down?

Still, Insane Balancing On One Leg In Extremely High Places is silly and fun in short doses. And it’s free, so there is literally nothing stopping you from insanely balancing on one leg in an extremely high place right now.