it was okay! I definitely remember hearing this game get hella marketing attention back when it was releasing, with places like nintendo power and nintendo week really gassing up this title. I guess it's weird that despite all that I don't think I ever knew a single soul that actually bought this game back at its release...

The game itself is a pretty run of the mill puzzley platformery type beat. Boy throws beans at blob, blob uses beans to change into stuff, stuff is used to overcome obstacles. I do think that they could have done a bit more conceptually with the idea, like having the beans be permanent upgrades or just having a lot more multi-purpose beans because the things the blob can turn into are really context sensitive and the levels definitely make it very obvious which beans should be used at what time. The boy himself can't really do much except throw beans and say "blob", and while he does control rather snappily on his own, the animations for doing various things combined with the blobs tendencies to get stuck on literally anything does mean that the game just has a very meandering pace to it. Lots of just standing around waiting for the blob to do its blobby things. The game has a decent enough hand-drawn animated aesthetic to it, and given the fact that the game has bespoke "hug blob" and "scold blob" buttons I get the idea they wanted to make some sort of emotional connection between player, boy, and blob, but the games real lack of any sort of coherent narrative kinda makes that fall a bit flat imo. It's just level after level with pretty much nothing in the way of cutscenes, menus, or any text in general really. They might have been going for some kinda minimalist philosophy or something, but it really just made the game feel like an xbox live arcade or wiiware title to me tbh. The music is very bland forgettable orchestral tracks too.

I definitely like the concept of having a character with a partner that can transform into anything, I just kinda hoped it was a bit more open-ended with how the puzzles were handled. I haven't played the original game on the NES, and after playing this, I should probably give it a try ngl. Doesn't really have any outstanding problems or flaws, but I don't think all the people that skipped out on getting this back in the day missed out on much.