Hands On with A Boy and His Blob
We take Wayforwards cute, charming and completely enthralling take on A Boy and His Blob for a spin. Free hugs for all involved
It’s a calm night. A comet rolls through the sky. The boy is sleeping peacefully in his tree house. The comet gets bigger. Suddenly the night is lit up as it races past and crashes into the earth. The boy wakes with a start. He climbs out of bed and yawns before running down the ladder and out to the crash. He approaches carefully. A white blob leaps out towards him. The boy lets out a shout that scares off the blob and runs away… before having a change of heart. He calls out to the blob and it gingerly approaches him. The boy gives it a huge cuddle and they happily wander back to his tree house. As they walk in they knock over a jar of jelly beans. The boy pockets them before jumping on the bed and stashing the blob under his head like a pillow.
That’s the opening to A Boy and his Blob, the unexpected but long awaited revival of a NES-era game. It’s still a 2D platform-puzzle game. It’s organic and smooth. There are no menus, no ‘press start’ screens. You never have control taken away for more than a moment. The boy wakes up to a warm morning and your adventure begins. To begin with all you’ve got is a big blank map on your wall and a lot of empty shelves. It’s still a cool house. It reminds me of the Lost Boys’ hideout from Hook. Walk up to the map and you’ll find your stage selection.
That said, those same levels can be very challenging if you choose to go after the three treasure chests in each one. These treasure chests are usually put in plain sight, but require a sharp mind or sharp reflexes to get too. Once your blob swallows them down – ‘Gulp!’ – they unlock bonus stages and cool concept art and design documents. Some of the puzzles have obvious solutions, like dropping an enemy through a hole in the ground, or pushing an anvil on its head to get past. Others require multi-bean operations and are fiendishly precise in their undertaking. Several took five or ten minutes of combined brainpower from the rep and I to figure out.
The game is generous with checkpoints and never seemed like it would become frustrating. It plays a lot like a series of puzzles with platforming action to segue between them. The variety of jelly beans and the depth of some of the puzzles ensure that it shouldn’t become stale. Apparently the game introduces limited jelly beans to stages later on, making it more of a challenge. Bonus levels seem to be more action than puzzle – such as parachuting down a tunnel full of nasty slime monsters that requires some fast manoeuvres to pass. Tere are also bosses at the end of each world. The encounter I played was challenging and original – I didn’t need to hit it three times with anything. Each part was its own little puzzle.
A Boy and his Blob looks great. The real star of the show had to be the graphics. It’s old school 2D, but it’s classy. It brought to mind Studio Ghibli movies like My Neighbour Totoro. The environments were all beautiful, like the multi-layered backgrounds of trees all swaying in the wind. The movement is so slight as to be imperceptible, but it looks great. Little birds flutter around. The second world, with its city scapes and underground caverns, is just as impressive. The shadowy and night scenes were my favourite. I’d never seen a 2D game which does a great job of lighting, but this does. It’s hard to convey the effect. In many ways those levels hearken to the dazzling light scapes of Disney’s Fantasia. One level was simply walking down a hill from the first forest world to the city world. The boy and his blob are both silhouetted against the brilliant lights of the city. It’s probably one of the most stunning levels I’ve seen in a game, and I barely had to do anything.
They’ve managed to cram a lot of character into the boy and his blob. The boy looks eager as he runs around. He’s not very strong, so when he pushes up again a rock you can see his tongue poke out with the effort. The blob is just that, a plain white blob with a smiley face, but they manage to convey a character with that too. The blob can’t get hurt, but it will turn grey and shake as you pass by an enemy. The real magic happens when you put the two together though. There’s a button you can press to give the blob a hug. The boy lets out a big ‘Hmmmm!’ from the effort of squeezing the blob, which gives a huge grin in return. It’s embarrassingly cute. There’s a button to tell it off as well for when he’s been a naughty blob. I accidentally pressed it a few times when figuring out the controls. It turned pink with shame. I felt so guilty.
Boy and his Blob is a game with heart. That doesn’t sound very macho. Don’t worry though! The puzzles are so mind-frazzling (in a good way) that you won’t care. The art is gorgeous, some of the level design is exceptionally clever and the play between the boy and his blob is spell binding. The controls are good, if they take some getting used to, and you can use either the remote and nunchuk or the classic controller. The game isn’t too fast paced, so don’t expect to be blown off your chair. You won’t be let down if you let yourself spend some time getting drawn into the world of A Boy and His Blob.
Keep an eye out for our full review soon! Vooks played a near final build of the game, due out on November 12th. Thanks to AFA Interactive for giving us time with it.
