The Digital Matrix: A Boy and His Blob

One day a boy is hanging out in his treehouse, when suddenly a meteorite strikes nearby! On his way to the impact site, the boy runs into strange shadowy creatures…and then he finds what landed…the blob! The two become fast friends, and combine their abilities to defeat the shadow aliens on Earth, then the blob’s homeworld!

A Boy and His Blob is a 2D platformer remake of a game released in 1989. The people behind the remake took what they felt were the strongest parts of the original game and rebuilt it from the ground up. The game is now set up as four ‘worlds,’ with ten stages to beat in each. Although there’s a ton of nostalgia here for fans of the original game, it fully stands on its own.

Let's get to it!

1. Graphics [Outstanding] The first sign of quality you’ll find in this game is the visual presentation. All of the character designs look great, and are animated fluidly. The boy in question looks and feels just like Christopher Robin (from Winnie the Pooh), and the blob looks just like a living beanbag with eyes. All the enemies in the game seem to be made of tar, but each moves and acts differently from the other. One looks like a frog (and will eat the blob), another is a big guy who walks on two feet and tries to punch the boy, while the most prominent and dangerous of the bunch are the floating balls that explode when touched.

The environments the boy explores are well crafted and look straight out of a child’s storybook. Lots of color and animation is built in, especially when you get to the blob’s home world – the designers really attempt to make the world feel different with little alien critters moving about in the foreground and background. When you get to the final stage of each world, the environments start changing their look to be more ominous as you approach the boss character. This is very effective, especially considering how inviting and innocent early stages appear.

I felt this game got the right balance between ‘cute’ and ‘tasteful,’ as well as looking good but not to the point where it obstructs gameplay.

This is a pic from Blobonia, the blob's homeworld.

2. Game Play [Outstanding] Sometimes a video game executes its intended game play in such an effortless manner that it seems like the developers must have had this game ready for years, and were just tweaking it endlessly until they were told to release it. Such is the quality in A Boy and His Blob.

You control the boy, who can run & jump (albeit not very high), call the blob & chuck jellybeans. He can also hug the blob, although that’s not particularly useful to beating the game. Each stage you are given a select variety of jellybeans; the game doesn’t tell you what flavor these beans are, but the shapes the blob takes upon eating them is evident on the bean selection menu. Each type of bean has at least a few different uses. For example, the Apple jellybean turns the blob into a jack; you can use that as a platform, hit a switch on the ceiling, squish an enemy (if you can manage to get the jack underneath it), knock some rocks out of your way, and push some ceilings up and out of your way.

Signs in the background help you figure out when certain bean usage is in order.

I don’t want to spoil too much of the game, but even the boss characters you fight are fun and interesting. As with the rest of the game, fighting the bosses is part skill and part puzzle. The boy can’t attack directly, but he tends to have a few options at his disposal to eliminate the boss characters. The boy does die after getting hit once – this would be ultra-frustrating if it weren’t for the fact that you have infinite lives to beat the game with. Yes infinite lives…one of those old taboos that seems like cheating. Good thing gamers wised up and realized that limited lives often just means artificially extended shelf life and frustration!

3. Grab-Factor [Outstanding] Although the plot of the game is very simple, as long as you aren’t cute-phobic I bet it’d be a very hard thing to pick up this game and not be enthralled. So much obvious love and attention to detail is hard to come by these days in video games. For fans of the original game, you’ll consistently be surprised at where and how parts of the original game have been repurposed or reimagined.

Tangerine Trampoline!

4. Soundtrack [Great] A Boy and His Blob has some excellent music, the kind that stays with you for a day or so after playing it. The background themes supplement the graphics in sucking you into the game, either with light and happy tunes when you’re just figuring the game out early on, or tense music when the designers know they’ve set up a particularly challenging stage ahead. There aren’t a lot of sound effects, but the ones that exist are distinctive. The boy has a wide variety of things to say when calling the blob, and the voice fits the character perfectly. I particularly like how after you call the blob a few times, he’ll just whistle (like the original game).

5. Replay Value [Good] Although some people will do this as they play through the game the first time, if you find all three treasure chests in a stage, you’ll get a trophy for your hideout, your house, or the blob’s house. Each trophy, in turn, has a mini-stage to play through. If you beat that stage, you get a little ‘making of’ vignette. This provides some extra replay value besides just replaying the game for the sake of it.

The boy and his blob, chillin' in his tree house.

Overall Game Rating: 4.25/5 [Great] Even if you haven’t played the original, this game is worth buying. You’ll definitely get your money’s worth, and be supporting good game design.

Puzzle / Platformer                        By:  Majesco Games                        System: Nintendo Wii