A Boy and his Blob

When I was a kid the concept of an amorphous, jelly-like blob used to terrify me. Having once caught a snippet of the 1950s classic The Blob, my imagination filled with amoeboid terror. At night in my bedroom every pile of clothes, lumpy stuffed animal or unknown shadow was clearly a quivering mass of hungry protoplasm ready to pounce, digest and absorb. Perhaps it is for this reason that I view the friendly, adorable Shmoo of a blob in A Boy and his Blob with suspicion. I just can’t shake the feeling that it is only a matter of time… after one puzzle too many takes too long to solve, that titular Boy may just end up chow for his inscrutable alien companion.

Actually, as an adult I’ve managed to mostly reign-in my fear of gigantic single-cell organisms, although I’m still genuinely creeped out by the 1972 movie remake Beware the Blob! (have you ever seen the opening sequence? It features a little orange kitten walking around in waving tall grass set to a frenetically happy 70’s musical score occasionally punctuated by screams. This is disturbing enough… the movie is worse.) Maybe it is all those little friendly slimes and puni from Japanese RPGs that have made me more capable of accepting the notion of a huggable blob. Whatever your blob disposition may be, you will find little to offend in this extremely saccharine, family-oriented adventure game.

A Boy and his Blob is a classic puzzle/platformer where you control a little boy and his pet pile of goo. By feeding different color jelly beans to your bouncy blobby friend, you induce him to alter his shape into various useful tools… ladder or anvil, hamster ball or rocket ship, parachute or portable hole. You use these clever topological tricks to traverse hill and dale, collecting treasure chests and avoiding a variety of evil black blobs, who are probably upset as they can’t seem to change their shapes at will like your blobbo can. Oh, and watch out for little yellow birds that like to steal your beans throughout your quest. They’re sure to inspire the same warm kind of feeling that New Yorkers have for pigeons.

The game is arranged in four sets of ten levels, with the first set serving mostly as a tutorial for the proper care and feeding of your blob. Each level hides three treasure chests, which you can collect to reveal various little boy treasures: dinosaurs and totem poles and suits of armor and the like. Finding all three treasures in a level also opens up a second bonus level, bringing the total number of boards to traverse to a very satisfying eighty. Bonus levels often showcase single jelly bean powers (often the newest available) and tend to be a bit easier than hunting down all the treasure on the core 40 levels.

While the game has a definite charm (I loved the happy trot of the loading screen quadripedal blob) there is some question of defining the target audience. The many shapes that the blob can acquire are fun to learn, especially the later ones like the rocket ship and the giant hamster ball. The jelly bean selection wheel is a good interface, although I sometimes found it a bit sticky and awkward to select the right bean. Also, the actual puzzles were often too easy for me, and possibly too hard for kids of a similar age to The Boy (plus, the boss monsters at the end of each set of ten levels could be a little scary to particularly young players). Older kids may find the game a bit too cutsey and sweet, and the gentle musical stylings of the Boy and his Blob BGM band could put a hyper-caffeineted Middle Schooler to sleep in seconds flat. Hmm. Parents may not necessarily find that to be a bad thing…

The level design is satisfying, and things really pick up once you reach the third set of stages (the Boy gets to go to Blob World, full of gelatinous hills and fruit candy colors.) That being said, I feel like a lot more could have been done to invest the player more in the relationship between the blob and boy. Other than feeding jelly beans to your blob and calling him over to your position (usually by yelling blob three times fast) there is little else the two of you can do together. Sure, you can hug your blob… but it would have been great if there were more options than that.

A journey needs anecdotes, memorable moments and more interactions. Couldn’t the blob have done a few more tricks on its own? How about a little mischief or some funny, additional encounters? The boy also has very little going for him… with no extra animations than those necessary to the game play, the boy appears kind of passive and disinterested in his magical adventure. For all the surface warmth of look and theme, A Boy and his Blob feels a bit clinical… there simply isn’t much of a human element to latch onto as you play.

In the end, A Boy and his Blob provides a slow oozy trickle of amusement, but studiously fails to be memorable in any way. The game is completely safe for kids, and I respect the decision by the creators to play things straight, but without a hint of subversiveness the game needs to be a lot more creative to hold one’s interest. With the oncoming slew of platform puzzle titles being released in the direct download market, it seems likely that this blob will be quick to be absorbed and disappear.