In 2008, the Nintendo Wii was the best-selling video game console in the world. It was all the rage with soccer moms and the elderly, but many thought its game library skewed too heavily towards Wii Sports casual fare at the expense of the core gamer. Developer Blue Tongue tried to change that with their 3D platformer – de Blob.
While de Blob is technically a 3D platformer that fits in the same category with other Wii titles like Super Mario Galaxy and Sonic Colors, the gameplay is less about platforming and more about coloring the world around Blob (the main character) from black, white, and grey into something much more vibrant, all to the background of a phenomenal jazz-funk soundtrack.
The world of de Blob has a story in which you must liberate the colorful and buoyant Raydians from the tyrannical grip of the Graydians, who want the world covered in a veil of black, white, and grey. You play as a character simply known as Blob who must lead the Raydians to glorious freedom. You do this by rolling around and coloring everything in the environment. As you do, not only does the world become more colorful, but the music changes. It starts out subdued, and as Blob progresses through the level, you get a full jazz-funk track that cheers you along and adds a ton of flavor to the gameplay. By the time you have a whole stage teeming with color, the music is going all out.
Enough can’t be said about the soundtrack in de Blob. It’s one of the best aspects of the game and keeps you going when some of the other major flaws start to rear their heads (more on that later). It’s mostly jazz and funk, but also delves into other genres like salsa, plus some others I couldn’t quite place. It’s the best jazz music I’ve heard in a game not named Persona.
Paint canisters are scattered throughout the game’s ten stages. There are the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue, but Blob can also combine them to get green, orange, purple, and brown. When he rolls over a paint canister or slams himself down on it, he changes color. He can then color the buildings, trees, and other structures in the world. You’re given either a bronze, silver, or gold medal depending on how much of the world Blob has colored, how many of the game’s challenges have been completed, and other criteria.
de Blob is not a game that’s going to test your platforming abilities by any stretch unless you’ve never played a 3D platformer before. Even then, the actual platforming is very basic. It’s very easy to pick up and play and seems tailored for a younger audience in its difficulty. The gameplay doesn’t evolve a whole lot. Blob gets a few small abilities, but he remains relatively the same throughout. The enemies get a little more difficult as you progress, but you take them out the same way. The only difference is that it requires more paint to do so. The coloring gameplay set to the great soundtrack do enough to keep the game afloat and fun, and as long as you don’t expect much from it other than that, it’s a good time.
Which is good because the actual platforming mechanics leave a lot to be desired. Coupled with an indecisive camera that seems prone to sudden, jerky movements and whirling around Blob unexpectedly, things can get disorienting and frustrating quickly. The problem with de Blob is that when it ventures anywhere outside of its fun coloring gameplay, it quickly starts getting in its own way. When the game is supposed to be a 3D platformer and the jumping mechanics are one of the worst aspects of the game, that’s a problem. Not to mention the camera, which is just as bad. A bad camera in a 3D platformer can single-handedly ruin the experience. There were many instances where Blob would be in a physically tight space and the camera would’ve better served by just panning out. Instead it would try to follow Blob around in the tight space, pointing at the ground and becoming useless.
Also, there’s a first-person option the player can use to look around. Unfortunately, it’s almost completely useless as well since you can’t look up. In fact, you can only move the camera left and right, which limits your ability to see the world when you’re trying to figure out where you need to go next.
The actual platforming is fine as long as you’re not being asked to do anything with any degree of difficulty. Mainly because the jumping isn’t that fun and lacks any kind of dynamic qualities to make it fun. It’s a function of the gameplay, but not the centerpiece, and along with the shaky camera, it could’ve meant disaster for the game as a whole.
Maybe the single most frustrating aspect of the platforming is that Blob automatically sticks to any flat surface he touches no matter what. It works great when you’re trying to get from point A to point B since he can vault himself around quickly. However, it can make you want to throw your controller through your screen when you’re trying to do a simple jump on a platform, and he instead sticks to it because he can’t get high enough. Unfortunately, this happens a lot. Common sense would ask why the developers didn’t let the player decide when they wanted Blob sticking to walls by mapping that function to a button, but whatever the reason, it frequently made the platforming a tedious chore when it easily could’ve been otherwise. Thankfully, the rolling and coloring gameplay, along with the strong soundtrack, comes to the rescue and turns everything into a unique experience.
The best thing I can say about the jumping and camera mechanics is that developer Blue Tongue seemed somewhat aware of their limitations and kept the game as accessible as possible by keeping the difficulty low and thus mitigating their issues. Even the platforming challenges are pretty easy and earning gold medals is not that hard.
Another glaring oversight is the save system. There is no option to manually save, which might lead one to believe that you can exit out of the game whenever you want, the game will auto-save, and you can pick up right where you left off. Wrong! The auto-save doesn’t kick in until you complete a stage. However, at no point does the game bother to communicate this to the player. In fact, the game sees fit to interrupt the gameplay frequently, giving you instructions about its different facets, but it never mentions anything about saving. So if you don’t know this going in, it’s very likely that you’ll end up having to replay maybe a large portion of a previous gaming session. Thankfully, I only had to replay about 30 minutes of gameplay, but it’s an inexcusable omission, not to mention a bad design decision by the developers. It can take some time if you want to complete all the challenges in a stage and 100% color all the buildings, and forcing the player to play a complete stage in one sitting is antithetical to the game’s casual, relaxed gameplay. I have no idea what the developers were thinking.
Another puzzling aspect is not letting the player re-enter a stage and continue completing challenges and other goals they’ve started. Once you reach the exit point of a stage and complete it, that’s it. If you want to re-enter the stage, you’re forced to start over from scratch, which is a completely bizarre design decision. Although I’ve heard this was changed in de Blob 2.
All that being said, while de Blob is not a great game by 3D platformer standards, it has a lot of heart in spite of its mechanical and design decision issues. Its gameplay is unique and I loved the music, which is what kept me coming back to it.
Visuals are what you would expect from a mid-2000s Wii game, and it runs great on PC at a very high framerate with no major issues. There’s a little noticeable pop-in here and there in the various stages, but nothing that distracts from the gameplay. All the aliasing the Wii version had has been remastered out in the modern ports and looks just fine.
VERDICT
In many ways, de Blob is a game of its time. Developer Blue Tongue made a game for the Wii and the Wii audience with motion-controls, accessible difficulty for new gamers, kid-friendly characters and humor, and an upbeat soundtrack. All that was great, but the experience is handicapped by the game’s basic platforming and camera and prevented it from being the smash hit it maybe could’ve been. That being said, de Blob is still a good time and brings a unique take on 3D platformers that hasn’t been duplicated since. Blue Tongue is no more and de Blob as a series probably won’t be making a comeback anytime soon, but these games are playable on modern platforms for cheap and are still worth checking out for the fun coloring gameplay and soundtrack.
The Gamer's Standard 