Raydia is a beautiful, wildly colorful land populated by artists and musicians. At least it was before being invaded by a militaristic corporation known as INKT that literally sucked the color out of Raydia’s buildings and turned its citizens into colorless, dispirited Graydians. Turning those Graydian’s back into Raydians and expelling the monochromatic menace is the goal in Blue Tongue’s platformer De Blob.
The Tyranny of Black and White
While INKT proceeds to turn Raydian musicians into Graydian accountants and build a machine that can create black ink from the tears of Graydians, a few Raydian’s form the Color Underground to fight back. There are five Raydian’s in the Underground, but as the titular Blob the player is the one who does all the hard work.
De Blob’s goal is to recolor his country. Essentially a large colorless beachball with arms, De Blob can roll in paint to become a giant paint roller. Paint is available from INKT “paintbots” that suck the color from Raydia to transport it to INKT warehouses. De Blob leaps on a paintbot with a flick of the Wii controller, after which it can clamber over buildings to paint them. Paintbots only carry primary colors, so if De Blob wants to paint something green it must hit both a blue and yellow paintbot.
The other members of the underground give De Blob assignments. These involve painting buildings specific colors, racing along paths to new locations, pouring large amounts of paint into INKT installations to turn them back into whimsical Raydian buildings or taking out INKT soldiers by bouncing on them.
With these simple basics, De Blob creates the best platforming experience ever seen for the Wii.
A Not-So-Furious Race to the Exit
De Blob can reach the tops of skyscrapers by leaping from one building to the next, can bounce on buttons to disable booby traps or can hitch a ride on the tram system. Making things more difficult are rivers of black ink running through the cities; once dipped in the black goo, De Blob becomes a poison ball, painting buildings black and killing plants as it desperately tries to find a cleansing fountain or lake before the ink kills it.
De Blob has a limited amount of time to make it through a level, and also a time limit when performing individual tasks. You gain more time whenever you complete a task, and can also win time by painting a block of buildings, at which point Graydians will wander into the street where they can be colorized into Raydians.
While the game is generous with time, if you get stuck too long repeating a particularly difficult task the clock will run out and you will have to restart from the level’s beginning. I found this particularly frustrating when I ran out of time in the midst of De Blob’s final, elaborate battle against INKT’s leader, Comrade Black. I wish the game had created a check point at the beginning of that battle.
You cannot save your progress in the middle of a level. This makes me nervous – I’m always afraid a fuse in my apartment will blow and I’ll lose my progress – so I would always play each level straight through, which could take a couple of hours.
A Game You'll Want to Linger Over
You don’t really need to complete that many tasks to finish a level. As you complete tasks and paint buildings, gates to new areas will open even though there is plenty left to do where you are. Even goals that are stated as the point of a particular level are optional, as I discovered when I accidentally went through a level’s exit before completing the final task. It would have been nice if De Blob gave players an “are you sure you want to exit?” prompt to prevent this from happening, but they don’t.
I am the sort of gamer who generally just likes to keep moving forward as quickly as possible, but while playing De Blob I found tasks too irresistible to skip, and even after a gate to the next area was unlocked I would diligently paint every building, run every race and smash every INKT soldier I could find before moving on. The game is way too much fun to rush through.
A Must-Have Game
In fact, in spite of a few minor caveats, I loved almost everything about De Blob, from its vivid, paint-splattered graphics to its funky score to the humorous cut scenes of INKT perpetrating its offenses. The game offers challenge without torturing players (if you run out of time on a task and have to repeat it you take up from where you left off, making few tasks impossible to complete). The gameplay mechanics are simple and straightforward yet never become tiresome. De Blob even offers a handful of fun multiplayer games involving competitive coloring.
I also think I love this game because I live in New York City, an odd mix of Raydian and Graydian culture where artists and musicians compete for space with corporate lackeys,
I have a deep desire to see my city brightened up. Once De Blob has finished painting Raydia, I would love it to visit my town. When De Blob paints Wall Street purple and all the stockbrokers run out into the street to be turned into colorful Raydians, my love of De Blob will be complete.
