de Blob (Wii)
In de Blob, the colorful lives of the Raydians dims severely when the INKT Corporation transforms the vibrant Chroma City into a monotonous monotone. With black and white being the law of the land under Comrade Black, even the citizens are turned grey, and sadly the efforts of the Color Underground to add some color back into people’s days can’t stand up to the military might of the colorless oppressors. Luckily, just outside of town lives the energetic Blob, a creature whose body can take in paint and splatter it wherever he goes, and since he’s pretty keen on living free, he sees what happened to Chroma City and leaps into action to paint the town in this action platforming adventure.
de Blob comes right out with a straightforward but appealing goal for its gameplay, the world serving as a bit of a coloring book with your character the way you fill in the sights. While the color was taken from the citizens in what appears to be an effort to control the populace, each of the game’s ten main levels does start off with a well animated wordless cutscene that shows INKT’s forces trying to enforce their dictatorship only to come up against the outside problem of the Blob splattering the town and foiling their various devices for trying to keep the place paint-free. Despite the INKT corporation having troops you’ll encounter, combat isn’t often a major focus, de Blob most of all about painting the world even though it’s not too complicated a process.
While the Blob starts off a level colorless, the Paintbots who sucked up the city’s color are now your source for paint. Smashing into one will give the blob its color, and while you’ll only find red, yellow, and blue Paintbots, you can grab one color after the other to mix for different colors like purple, green, orange, and brown. While exploring a level normally, you’re free to color things whatever hue you like, the Blob simply needing to touch something like a building or object to instantly color it entirely. Despite being designed for the Wii, the motion sensing and pointer controls of the Wii remote are used mostly in small or gimmicky capacities. You can draw on the loading screen and menus but not on buildings during play, and to do things like jump or attack, you need to slam down the remote. While it is fine to have the Blob’s slam attacks triggered with a satisfying motion control flick, the fact normal jumping is tied to it just ends up a touch tedious or leads to little responsiveness issues. There is platforming in de Blob and if the game is a little slow on detecting your controller swing you might mistime a jump and navigating a small set of jumps can feel needlessly slow or even unresponsive if you’re in a tight spot, but luckily when jumping is an actual challenge the game usually sets things up well so you can move fluidly when it truly matters.
Most of the time in de Blob though you’ll be exploring different areas of Chroma City and restoring both the color and the vivacity to the area. When you first slide on into a black and white region ruled by INKT, it feels downright dim thanks to low lights and empty streets, but as you start spreading the color around, the music starts kicking in, funky jams backing you as each new painted object is highlighted with a little musical flourish. Four members of the Color Underground will be hanging around to provide you small missions that help with your goal of bringing life back to the place, each character having a specific type of goal. Few of them are particularly difficult even as you get deeper into the adventure, even the combat ones often more tests of if you have enough paint to crush the forces of INKT, but they do give a little direction and some will involve you converting INKT structures into lively locations the freed Raydians can enjoy. The best missions are likely the ones hosted by Arty, the artsy green girl often asking you to color nearby structures in a specific manner, the player sometimes having to identify the proper order of operations less they risk painting over their work. Timers can make things like the little skater Zip’s racing missions a touch more difficult, but often they’re just a way to give you brief direction and are a fine way of adding a little structure even if the characters can sometimes talk a bit too slowly or too often when you just want to go around town adding color back to everything you see.
de Blob’s levels will take you from packed downtowns full of skyscrapers to shipyards and what is a bit charitably called an amusement park, but some areas start off quite different from how they’ll look once you’ve colored them and performed some missions to free the residents and convert INKT buildings. Factory areas or places absolutely flooded with ink will change shape after you’ve done your work in the area, the Blob not just splashing paint everywhere but sometimes noticeably altering the landscape into something nicer for the Raydians. Levels can be surprisingly huge, many potentially taking nearly an hour to clear if you’re trying to go for all the optional goals. Each of the main stages has a set of overarching objectives such as painting at least 75% of the area, rescuing all the Raydians, painting every tree and billboard, and clearing the challenges the Color Underground has for you. There is a timer objective that is often below ten minutes so it almost needs to be pursued on its own, but otherwise the objectives give more interesting structure to the casual exploration as you try to hit every object you can and poke around for things hidden from sight so you can try and clear every goal. It helps that the coloring is inherently satisfying yet simple, moving between sections of a stage usually providing you the immediate easy goal of painting the town while you keep your eyes open, but even in the toughest levels enemies do feel a bit like a joke. Beyond the final and only boss, most enemies are easily defeated or ask you to collect a little extra paint before you try to splatter them. Accidentally absorbing ink in the environment is the bigger danger save for when the INKT Corporation actually whips out things like turrets that require more paint to crush than usual baddies, but combat is definitely more of an afterthought here and a token resistance so you aren’t always painting things too easily.
Once you’ve beaten a level though, you will unlock two secret missions attached to it, these taking place in dedicated areas and designed purely for whatever purpose they hold. These can be similar to Arty’s paint challenges but actually require fast movement and perfect paint collection to clear, there often little wiggle room in the time limit. Your slam move to hit enemies and objects is used more as a fast movement tool to rapidly lunge from one spot to another, a greater focus on identifying what you need to do and executing it making these extra missions feel like what the main game’s challenges could have been with a bit stronger direction. de Blob is definitely meant to be an all ages game and even though the main levels start off with a timer, you can easily add to it and at least clear it even if you don’t devote time to clearing the extra objectives. If you want a bit more challenge you can always take things to the Blob Party multiplayer mode for up to four players, things like competing to paint more of the town than each other, avoiding an ink flood while painting, or trying to paint as much as possible before you’re caught by the other players making for energetic group fun that still taps into the main game’s enjoyable focus on transforming an environment into something vivid with the individual touch you applied with your color choices.
THE VERDICT: While it often leans on the straightforward joy of painting, de Blob at least constructs things well for it to be a quick and satisfying task even if its levels can feel surprisingly long. The Wii remote being used for jumping is a little rough and overall the game isn’t too difficult, but the level objectives and character-led missions still give you enough direction for the enjoyment not to dry up, elements like the actually challenging secret missions and strong multiplayer further helping this adventure provide a spectrum of ways to enjoy its simple idea of restoring color to a monotone world.
And so, I give de Blob for Nintendo Wii…
A GOOD rating. de Blob is correct in thinking that you can get pretty far on the simple idea of providing a big empty canvas of an environment and keeping the player entertained with the task of filling it in with color. Little elements like Raydians appearing for rescue after you color a small section of an area also give you the periodic reinforcement of your progress beyond the obvious visual element. The task isn’t made too difficult even when the enemies step up their game a bit though and the Color Underground could do with being a bit more creative in the tasks they line up for you, but having the secret missions at least gives you an area of the game that explores the potential of your movement and the ways the coloring mechanics can be used to structure a true challenge. After the Wii release de Blob would be ported eventually to other systems that likely have the jumping control much simpler so you can avoid that little hiccup in this game’s design, but the arbitrary motion controls don’t weigh things down despite the occasional stumble involving them. Most of the time you’ll be splatting the area with your paint with ease, and that ease might be what holds the game back a touch. More bosses or unique goals could add some more demanding structured content, but the free form exploration with the light guidance of the level objectives is also a satisfying through-line for stages so it shouldn’t be at the expense of that satisfying freedom either.
de Blob achieves its goal of providing an all ages approach to a game where action and coloring intersect and a lot of its design seems to go towards that focus most of all. Seeing the shift from a dim grey world to a vibrant land with pumping music and frolicking citizens is an entertaining process even when the process isn’t too different between stages, but de Blob did put in the extra touches like optional goals to prevent things from becoming repetitive and dull. While perhaps its larger stages could have had a few checkpoints if you just wanted to jump in and play for a bit, de Blob does definitely deliver on giving spaces that are exciting to recolor, the simple drive to see it all come alive again enough to make this game enjoyable even before you factor in the moments of more directed play.