Tales from Space: About a Blob (PS3)
Tales from Space: About a Blob is a game I had no idea existed until I went searching for PlayStation 3 exclusives to play, and that’s because the shadow of its sequel has all but covered it up. Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack was not only a launch title for the PlayStation Vita, but it is available on the Switch, Xbox 360, PS3, and home computers, meaning it’s much easier to find than the first game in this two part series that decided to stick to the PS3 only. It seems Tales From Space: About a Blob is stuck on its release console due to taking some funding from Sony through the SCEA Pub Fund program, but after learning Mutant Blobs Attack is indeed a sequel, I went to see what the first tale from space was all about.
Out in the reaches of space, a group of alien blobs seek to find the next planet they can invade. Hoping to absorb matter and grow in size, the blobs pick out the heavily populated planet of Earth as their next target, but one thing stands in the way of their objective: they’re incredibly tiny to start. No bigger than your thumb, the blobs are easily captured by the humans, and even the scientists observing these aliens don’t seem too concerned about keeping a close watch on them until a specific one breaks free and starts causing trouble. Playing as either as an orange blob if you tackle the puzzle platformer solo or an orange and green pair if you bring a friend along, your goal is to absorb whatever you can in the area to grow in size, fight back against the humans who are trying to bring you down to size, and eventually assimilate enough of the world to feed that hunger that drove the alien blobs to the planet in the first place.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a protagonist that is just a little blob doesn’t start off with too many tricks to call on. A lot of your level navigation depends on jumping around areas like the interior of a lab, the area around a farm, or the streets of a city based on how big you’ve become, but despite your hero being gelatinous, their jump is actually a bit rigid. Your ability to move the blob in midair is limited and you’ll need a bit of a lead up even in the sometimes tight spaces to get it to move as far as you’d like. Wall jumps aren’t completely smooth either save where they’re not meant to be a challenge to pull off properly, but the good news is that only optional hidden blobs ever ask you to be incredibly adept at how you jump or handle momentum so the slightly stiff way the blob moves will rarely hamper your ability to move about the important parts of the level. Even timed puzzles later in the game can be managed well enough once you’ve come to understand the movement’s minor quirks, but for something you are going to be doing so often, a bit more work should have been done to make it feel fluid even if there had to be some limitations on how you move to maintain difficulty.
One of the cornerstone mechanics of Tales from Space: About a Blob is the absorption of objects. So long as an object is smaller than your blob is you can easily roll over it and integrate it into its mass, and in a nice visual touch you can often see a few recently absorbed bits and bobs moving around in its jello-like form. Getting past an area often has a size requirement either because you need to press down on something or absorb an object of the right size that’s blocking your path, so many of the game’s puzzles are about navigating an area to grab the mass you need. One little trick your character has for interacting with the world is firing the objects it hasn’t completely digested out of its body, this used to do things like fight enemies and activate switches. You don’t need to be too careful with aiming since you can always summon the lost objects back to your body by holding down a button, but this form of interaction is often about as simple as the platforming demands and even has a little roughness to it in that sometimes hurling an object in a direction might take a few tries before the flight path does what you’re hoping for. This can be especially true of the boss battles, one in particular having an instant kill attack that is easy enough to dodge but the slow fight and reliance on your attacks hitting its weak point square on can raise the chances of an unfortunate slip up.
There are two abilities you acquire that help the game be more than a rough and simplistic puzzle platformer though. Magnetism is your first new tool and it opens up the gameplay a lot more in terms of where you can go and what you can do. Clinging to metal walls to climb them, guiding objects you can’t reach around with your magnetic pull, and even essentially flying by reversing your polarity to launch yourself away from a metal platform all begin to make the action more diverse. Puzzles can start to ask more of your little blob than hurling around objects or hopping onto things, and movement via magnetism is even a bit smoother than regular jumping unless there are plenty of magnetic objects in the area to confuse your power. Magnetism does come into the fray early on for this 17 level long adventure so you aren’t left doing the plain platforming too long, but the other ability you acquire actually waits a fair bit before it enters the equation.
Your alien blob is able to hold an electrical charge if you can find a power source, but unlike magnetism, this power doesn’t quite feel like a newly ubiquitous enhancement to the platforming and puzzles. There are many points where electricity is just something you need to get from Point A to Point B without it being automatically drained by something in the environment, meaning a few times the electricity is more like a glorified key than a true mechanic. It can be used to operate certain devices though. The boat rides are again more a case of using it as an on switch and then trying to safely clear a path for your ride while it’s moving with your other abilities, but one of the most clever parts of the game is when you’re navigating a large moving maze and you need to keep swapping how much charge it has so it will change its direction. Making the maze’s ceiling and floor rise and fall to avoid crushing you or getting a circular maze to spin properly so it is navigable show there was some more potential for the power, but its late arrival eventually gives way to the game’s last stretch of levels that are almost more of a power fantasy.
Once your blob starts getting big enough, many portions of the game will have it seek out some place to rest and digest, shrinking it down to size so the next stage can throw you into levels where it needs to be small again. At first this is easy enough to swallow since you go from exploring a science lab’s interior to being just about big enough to give the humans outside of it trouble, but as this process repeats your starting size and ending size will be larger each time. It can be a bit sad to get so large you’re sucking up people and vehicles and then be reduced back to the size of a baseball for the next stage, but the game does ensure the final stretch plays into a constant series of size increases where you can really start rolling up enormous objects. The puzzles get a bit simpler here but the humans also bring more advanced weapons to bear against you, so protecting yourself often becomes the larger challenge. Taking damage can make objects pop out of you, but you have a good amount of health and integrating new objects into your mass will heal you a little. However even the bosses without instant kills can feel a little slow, especially since a death causes a full fight restart, but the combat is mostly kept about as simple as much of the game experience.
THE VERDICT: Tales from Space: About a Blob can sometimes feel a little stiff with its jumping and object firing mechanics, but besides some slow boss fights, it’s mostly a breezy adventure that can sometimes impress with how it uses ideas like the magnetism ability. Some powers like electricity never reach their potential, but it can still be satisfying to watch your blob grow and start sucking up objects that once seemed towering pieces of the level geometry. Nothing in particular stands out as exceptional or agonizing in this seventeen level adventure, this puzzle platformer never really losing steam but also not quite finding out the best way to realize many of its core mechanics.
And so, I give Tales from Space: About a Blob for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. Magnetism is the real winner of an idea in Tales from Space: About a Blob, its integration allowing the platforming ideas and puzzle concepts to grow just likes it gooey protagonist. While the basic movement could be smoother and the electrical power doesn’t get explored deeply despite some promising moments, magnetism enters the picture and really starts to make you think more about how the level can be interacted with and how it can help your blob get around. A bit more attention paid to the basics of movement and how they can be built upon would help the game be stronger overall since the magnetism is just one of four ways you interact with this world and the game spends a fair bit of time with each one no matter how shallow they are, but the platforming and object firing are decent enough and the electricity is fine even though it’s not doing too much.
The SCEA Pub Fund seems a double-edged sword, DrinkBox Studios needing to keep this game exclusive to the PlayStation Network in exchange for the capital required to make its first game Tales from Space: About a Blob. Apparently this start was strong enough they could make a sequel to the title that released on a lot of platforms and eventually find much wider success with their smash hit Guacamelee!, but Tales from Space: About a Blob is stuck on the PS3 even though DrinkBox Studios technically own the rights to it and more people might be interested in playing it now that they have some clout. Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack does look like a sequel that aims to improve on a lot of what is attempted here though, but for the start of a talented indie developer and the first of only two tales from space, its limited availability may mean most might forget about this humble little title even thought it’s not exactly offering too much unique or special.