A Boy and His Blob is a charming reimagining of a classic game, bringing a whimsical world to life with beautiful hand-drawn visuals. Its core mechanic of feeding jellybeans to your blob companion to transform him into useful tools creates clever, satisfying puzzles. The heartwarming story of friendship and the imaginative level design will keep you engaged, though occasionally imprecise controls and a sometimes sluggish pace can be minor frustrations. Overall, A Boy and His Blob offers a delightful puzzle-platforming experience filled with heart.

I wanted to love this game, I really did. It has just the right amount of charm, and there's enough chemistry between boy and blob to make that an engaging concept, plus there's some very interesting puzzle mechanics. Unfortunately the game feels so bad to play, so sluggish and patient in a way that feels more like you're wrestling with the game to even do what you're telling it to. It also goes on way too long, so by the time you're halfway through the charm has completed washed away and you're left with samey visuals and sluggish controls. Still, I think the puzzle design is consistently interesting and I still do think I like A Boy and His Blob

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.

varied puzzle platformer with an emphasis on learning the ins and outs of each of your blob's different forms. the first half of the game is heavy on call-and-response formations, but they do a solid job introducing the fundamental uses of each transformation, the various interactable objects and enemies, and the mechanics of tossing around jellybeans (your blob's preferred treat and transformation medium). second half of the game fleshes out the puzzle structure and crafts more intricate challenges with multiple transformations, timing constraints, and careful coordination between enemies, the boy, and the blob.

what's most interesting is that even with how rigid the transformations are, there's often multiple solutions to puzzles later on in the game. part of this comes from auxillary uses for many transformations, such as the bouncy ball floating in water as well as giving the boy a higher jump, or the jack acting as a platform as well as a device for lifting objects. moreover, the designers seem to specifically give the player transformations with overlapping functionality when said functionality is needed, and since each object has other properties such as the anvil needing to be pushed everywhere or the cannon automatically sucking in the player when they approach, each solution ends up growing organically out of the tools you choose and their restrictions rather than the environment dictating what's feasible (though again, there's plenty of lock-and-key tidbits here and there unfortunately). the more mobile transformations such as the parachute or the rocket even allow the player to potentially circumvent sections of some puzzles with practice and careful handling.

however, there's three major issues that dampen the experience:

- the animation is certainly gorgeous and perfect tailored to the wii's ability, but it approaches full-on cinematic platformer territory in terms of the severe weightiness to any actions that aren't running or jumping. any blob transformation that requires interaction from the player invariably causes a long, pace-breaking animation that eats up precious time in a game where such transformations are used hundreds of times. the blob's behavior itself accentuates all of this; while I love the concept of the blob running towards the jellybeans you throw, the amount of time this traversal requires with minimal player involvement becomes a heavy burden as the game drags on. this is to speak nothing of the blob's poor pathfinding, its propensity for trapping itself under walls and platforms, the need for the player to repeatedly yell at the blob in order to activate a whistle sequence where it more-or-less teleports to your location... the game is nine hours long, and I would estimate that at least a third if not more of that time is waiting for the blob to move around or mindlessly calling/whistling to it.

- the transformations that expand the boy's traversal options are somehow uncomfortable to control across the board. the rocket is incredibly touchy with its turning, the bouncy ball's landing animation is too long and unresponsive given that you need to time an A press on each landing to continue bouncing, the parachute's control is extremely coarse, and the bubble... wow. the bubble serves not only as a protective shield for the boy but also allows him to accelerate to high speeds, which is 0-to-60 in a game that otherwise leans on its plodding pace. because of the lack of control over the bubble's speed when boosting, the designers instead opted to primarily feature it in sections where you roll through a bunch of tubes, no puzzle required. when you're expected to launch the boy into the air, even this breaks down, since the lateral air control of the bubble when you shooting straight up is inconsistent and seems dependent on the difficult-to-control bubble speed.

- there are bosses in this game, and as one might imagine from my earlier complaints on how unresponsive both the traversal transformations and the blob itself are, these all are major nuisances. conceptually each one tills some interesting ground regarding the potential of the toolkit, and each boss has different phases that necessitate different ways to attack them, but the execution falters due to the difficulty of adapting the core gameplay system to combat. the worst of these is the second boss at around the halfway point of the game, which requires the boy to use the bubble to navigate to various platforms in order to indirectly move exploding enemies into a location where the boss will collide with them. again, conceptually this is very strong, especially since each enemy requires a different solution in order to move into location, but the damn bubble is so difficult to control and flies off the boss everytime they bounce into each other. this is to say nothing of the boss's gigantic hitboxes, the difficulty in controlling the blob's pathfinding in a room with many small platforms (the blob loves to overshoot the beans you throw, which can make it fall off platforms), and the fact that any single hit causes the protagonist to die and reset all progress on the boss. the others are nearly as bad as well, barring the fourth boss which has a rather neat, multi-step puzzle that must be performed while projectiles rain from the sky; it helps that this boss only needs to be hit once.

might return to play more of the challenge rooms someday, there's so much sauce in the puzzles in the back quarter that I'd love to see how the unlockable challenges using the same mechanics operate. it's a shame that the turgid pacing and frequent lapses into pure annoyance make me reluctant to do it anytime in the near future.

An average puzzle-adventure game 6.5/10

Negative aspects of the game:

Interaction with the blob is extremely cumbersome. And when you make a wrong move, that's why it takes time to fix it, which makes you bored. Also the checkpoint system is very bad. A mistake you make at the solution point of the puzzle throws you at the beginning of the event and you are asked to do the parts up to the point you have already solved. There is no interesting story in the game. Boss battles are terrible.

The positive aspects are: the gameplay is constantly diversified and the graphics are pretty sweet.

Developed by WayForward, makers of Shantae, this is a puzzle platformer which is a re-imagining of the NES classic. The game has lovely 2D animation coupled with a nice soundtrack. You play as a boy who feeds jellybeans to a blob and each bean transforms the blob to a different object. You play through various levels on your way to defeat the evil king blob, and along the way you can collect chests to unlock bonus challenges. Beating those unlocks concept art and other bonuses. There isn't much of a story here, which is fine. A game like this doesn't need a grandiose story, just a simple tale works in its favor. Reason I take off some points is due to slightly finicky controls, and the game length feeling a little too long. I feel like 10 levels per area was a little much per world, and the challenge levels not having checkpoints made them annoying if you died at the very end of one.