A Boy And His Blob

A Boy and His Blob is a slow paced puzzle platformer filled with wonderful environments, some clever ideas, and a lot of love.

The gameplay is simple but creative, with the help of your blob you’ve got things to collect and levels to complete. Blob can turn into different things, like a trampoline or a bowling ball, to deal with different situations. Throw a pellet where you want blob to transform, and he’ll transform when he eats it. This adds some strategic placement elements on top of picking the right object. You get more objects to tranform into as the game unfolds, and some of them later on are ridiculously cool. There’s no backtracking in the game as each level has its own designated objects you can transform into when you enter it, and the treasure you can collect in each level can be obtained with what you have.

The challenge in the game comes from figuring out how to use blob to navigate the surroundings to advance, sometimes you’ll have to use enemies as well and get them to hit switches and be in a certain place, or simply get them out of the way. It’s mostly pretty straight forward, but there’s some real head scratchers later on, and some pretty creative stuff. There’s quite a lot of content in the game too, the levels just keep coming and they get better and better.

What’s unique about this game is that it’s impossible to get mad at. It’s really easy to die too, all you have to do is run into an enemy. You can even kill yourself by jumping too high on the trampoline and landing on solid ground. If I screw something up I don’t even mind, the game is so charming it feels like it’s forgiving you straight away. I died, who cares? Let’s try again. I’m still playing, I’m still here. It feels like it was designed this way. When standing next to your blob you can press up on the D-pad to hug it and it makes the coolest sound. It has no effect on anything in the game, it’s just there to make you feel good.

A Boy and His Blob is one of the best looking games i’ve ever seen. In a time that’s spoiling us with high resolution environments and multi-million dollar productions, that’s a big deal. However, this game isn’t in HD nor does it have a big budget. Just heart. It looks even better running on a TV than in screenshots, something that can’t be said for a lot of Wii games. The picture is very crisp, and the animation really brings it to life. There’s only one way this is accomplished and that’s with good artists. As you progress through the game you can unlock artworks and other cool goodies to view, which is a fantastic reward in a such a stylish game. The music is good too, nothing that really stands out on its own but it compliments the atmosphere well.

The gameplay has its flaws; sometimes blob will tard-out a bit as it tries to follow you, but it always eventually finds its way around. The controls aren’t always perfect for every object as well, but they’re easily manageable. There really aren’t many more flaws in the game than that – the progression of the game is rather safe and the difficulty slowly ramps up; it creates quite a smooth experience from start to finish. That doesn’t mean the game won’t surprise you, it’s constantly changing as new objects are introduced: in the later levels you’ll be doing things a lot differently from the first half of the game.

Playing this game makes me feel like a kid, like the boy in the game. It’s so very innocent. There’s no attitude, the only words the boy says are “blob!” or “over here!”. He has a cool hideout too, and it’s a cool feeling bringing back treasures from a level into your hideout. There’s nothing super about him either, his jump is about half a metre high and his only weapon is curiosity. It’s just a boy with wavy hair who has the coolest friend in the world, a blob.