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Mystic Balloon
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About the game
Mystic Balloon is a platformer about a small kid who never travels without a bunch of balloons. Each of its 39 levels is a maze several screens wide and tall, which the camera follows as you go: somewhere inside is a key, and somewhere else the door it opens. Six coins are hidden along the way for anyone who wants a perfect run.
The balloons are your jump and your life at once. Jump, press the button again in mid-air and the kid floats down slowly, drifting where you steer. Fans blow you upward or sideways while you float, which is how the higher ledges are reached. Spikes and the little creatures that walk the corridors pop a balloon each time they touch you, and with fewer balloons the kid falls faster. Lose the last one and the game is over.
There is a way to get them back. Hold the other button and the kid takes a deep breath, pulling coins closer and sucking in the creatures in front of him. Each one swallowed returns a lost balloon, or gives points if you still have all three.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now, choose PLAY on the title menu and then NEW, or LOAD to continue from the last level you reached.
The game saves your level, coins and score after every level, and your best score, in the emulated memory of the Arduboy, which is kept in this browser automatically. F2 also saves the complete state of the game at any moment, and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
This build comes from the Team-ARG-Museum archive, which removed a QR code that pointed to the team's old website, now gone. That code was all the HELP screen showed, so HELP is now empty: the controls are below.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Left / right | D-pad | walk |
| Up / down | D-pad | look up and down; Up also opens the door when you have the key |
| X | B | jump; press again in mid-air and hold to float |
| Hold Z | A | inhale: pull coins closer and swallow creatures |
| Z + down | A + D-pad | pause (Z or X resumes) |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Look before you leap. Up and down move the camera, so you can check what waits below a ledge before you drop into it.
Float to steer. A plain jump goes straight, but once the balloons open you can drift left and right while you sink, and fans only push you while you float.
Breathe in, not out. Creatures can't hurt you while you inhale them from a safe distance, and each one swallowed puts a balloon back.
Coins pay at the end. Each coin and each balloon you still hold adds points when the level ends, and collecting all six coins in a level gives a bigger bonus.
Credits and licence
Mystic Balloon was made in 2016 by TEAM a.r.g., credited to Gaveno, castpixel, JO3RI and Martian220, with thanks to MLXXXp for moving it to the Arduboy2 library. It is free software under the MIT licence. It uses the Arduboy2 (BSD) and ArduboyTones (MIT) libraries by Scott Allen. The licence texts are linked from this page. The team has since disbanded, and its games and source code are kept by the Team-ARG-Museum archive on GitHub.