What a disappointment

[admiral1018]

I bought this game during the last Steam sale and had really been looking forward to it. I know I’m late to the party on this one, but I have fond memories of playing the original NES game as a kid and typically love puzzle platformers. I wouldn’t say the original was a great game, or necessarily even a good game, but it did have two things going for it: a memorable title and a unique gameplay concept. To me, that is the perfect type of game for a remake.

To give this game its due, the graphics look beautiful and the soundtrack is really well done. There is a real charm to that, and I can see why many people are drawn into the game world and give it high praises. I can similarly see why some people could be enamored with the cute graphics and the boy’s friendship with the blob. Again, well done. But for me, sadly, that’s where the good feelings end.

A Boy and His Blob commits what I consider to be the cardinal sin of gaming in that it does not respect the player’s time. Slow. Slow is the keyword for every element of the gameplay. And this is not a relaxing, exploration-based game that benefits from that kind of pace. The game is needlessly slow.

The most egregious example of this is with the blob. I cannot even fathom how much play time I wasted just waiting around for the blob to get to me. After multiple, repetitive, annoying calls from the boy, the blob lazily floats over while I wait there doing nothing. I would literally look away from the screen and start thinking about other things, completely taken out of the game while I waited for it to let me play it again. Sitting around and waiting for the blob was one of the worst parts of the NES game, and this remake amazingly made that aspect even worse. It was mind-bogglingly bad design, and it highlighted several of the game’s other flaws, like the abysmal blob pathing or the terrible puzzle design that required timed actions from the blob. There is no reason the blob couldn’t have just teleported to your location immediately when you pressed the call button. That single change alone would have elevated my experience from “miserable” to “tolerable.”

The time wasting doesn’t end there. The boy moves slowly and controls terribly. This game has absurdly long and drawn-out animations for everything from the blob transformations to simply turning around. And while those may look great the first time, they become incredibly tedious when you’re sitting there yet again and waiting… waiting patiently for the game to let you play it. If you happen to die a few times in a section and need to repeat it, this wasted time is beyond irritating.

The treasure collection element of this game does the same thing. If you guess wrong at an unmarked junction and choose the “wrong” path, you need to repeat an entire level for the missing chest. It’s one thing to miss it because you weren’t carefully exploring, but to miss it literally because you guessed wrong is infuriating, and it’s a waste of the player’s time. I shouldn’t need to repeat content because the devs didn’t design the levels well.

Beyond those elements, this game has a fatal flaw in its basic design. The two aspects of gameplay for any puzzle platformer can be broken down as follows:

1. Figuring out what to do with a puzzle
   
2. Executing that solution

Almost every puzzle in this game is absurdly basic and easy to solve. The levels generally limit you to only a few jellybeans, and the game further insults your intelligence in the first half by including billboards that tell you exactly what to do. Whatever thought or creative challenge the puzzles might have invoked are taken away immediately.

So, that oddly leaves the bulk of the gameplay about execution. I can’t even begin to understand why the devs would focus on that part and then design the control scheme as it was. I’ve already mentioned how sluggish the boy’s movement is, but this game has puzzles designed around precise bean placement or timing with mechanics that don’t suit that design at all. Some of the controls for various blob forms – namely the bubble, bouncing ball, and rocket – are inconsistent and even outright abysmal in some cases. Even the controls for picking a new bean from the menu are buggy. Many times, I’d need to repeatedly tap the analog stick to select the choice I wanted. I have no idea if this is a holdover from the Wii controls, but it’s yet another flaw that ruins the game feel and makes everything seem sluggish and unresponsive.

I could go on, but I remember hitting a point early in the third world where I couldn’t believe I still had half the game left to play. I wanted to stick this one out (and finished it with 100% achievements) to see if it ever got any better. And while the final stages of world 4 finally did offer some interesting puzzle challenges, it was too little, too late. The game has way too much garbage content, and the sluggishness and poor controls ruin any interest I would ever have in replaying it.

A good game could have been made using this concept, but this was unfortunately a wasted endeavor. I had high hopes after really enjoying some of WayForward’s other classic remakes, but this game dropped the ball by focusing on the wrong things (precise platforming) when it was designed for something entirely different (puzzle solving). Maybe I’m in the minority here, since the reviews are largely positive, but it was sad to see a great premise and opportunity fall so flat.