A Boy and His Blob

Game Info

In 1989, a video game was released for the first console by Nintendo (NES) called A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia.  In 2009, two companies by the name of Majesco and WayForward decided to reboot the game entirely for the Nintendo Wii and call it just A Boy and His Blob.  Now in 2016, both companies have remastered the Wii version and released it on PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and the Vita.  This remastered version has 1080p visuals and for those trophy/achievement hunters, there are those available now as well.  For those who have never heard of this game before in the years of its’ existence, well it is about a “boy” who gets close with an alien “blob” and feeds it jelly beans to morph it into many objects to solve puzzles.

A Boy and His Blob starts out in the same fashion and the original Wii version, but with a bit crisper visuals.  You take control of the “boy” and travel outside of your treehouse to find some black oozing blobs roaming around the forest.  As you carefully navigate past them by jumping, you then come across a wreckage where a white “blob” emerges and shortly you befriend it.  The beginning of the game is very basic and straight forward with tutorials that are merely pictures on wooden signs as you progress through the levels.  You slowly gain more jelly beans to feed your friend “blob”, but each level will equip you with the exact beans needed to complete that area and you can’t change which you have access to.  The jelly beans will tranform the blob into many useful items such as a parachute, ladder, anvil, and many more.

The puzzles available in each level are pretty basic and get a touch more difficult as it goes on, but if you’re a veteran puzzle gamer then these will be quite simple for you to solve.  Every level has 3 treasure chests for the blob to collect with you and at the end there is a golden jelly bean that will transform the blob into a door for you to travel back to the main area.  Upon arriving back at the “base” if you will, the blob will spit out the treasure chests you have collected and if you found all three then a challenge level will be unlocked.  If you decide to do the challenge levels, then you will unlock concept art and videos from the game when you complete them.

There are four areas you will travel to in A Boy and His Blob, these being the forest levels, cave levels, Blobolonia and The Citadel.  Each area has ten levels and a boss at the end of each world that will have to be killed to progress to the other areas.  There is no multiplayer in this game and it doesn’t need the option as it serves well being a single player puzzle gaming experience.  The replay value isn’t too high since you can 100% the game in you first play through if you’re that OCD about collecting the treasure chests.

Visually this game looks great with the cartoon style colorful art all displayed in 1080p.  The biggest issue is possibly in performance as it seemed to have a lot of framerate drops or skipping as if it’s not loading fast enough.  I did review this title on the Xbox One and I wasn’t able to compare it to the other platform releases, but I’m sure they are all near identical.  The music is very light and fitting of the levels and areas you come across.  There isn’t a lot of extreme sound effects to stand out, although you are constantly calling you blob to change him out of the object forms or to simply have him catch up to you.  This did get annoying after awhile hearing the boy constantly say “BLOB”, “HURRY” and a few other choice phrases that got repeated quite frequently.

The Recommendation

A Boy and His Blob was a nice reboot in 2009 and definitely was refreshing to see a 1080p version released on more current systems for many others to experience.  Majesco and WayForward did a great job in delivering a puzzle game with a unique and colorful personality to it.  Even though the replay value isn’t too high and the framerate stutter is there, that doesn’t mean you should avoid this timeless classic remade from the ground up.