De Blob

So over the weekend I finally played a little game from the Independent Games Festival called De Blob. This was the entry from the Hogeschool van de Kunsten in Utrecht, Netherlands in the student competition. It's a great little game where you play an alien blob that rolls around absorbing people of different colors, changing colors yourself, and painting buildings whatever color you happen to be at the moment. You start with an entirely gray city, and end in a riot of colors. There are specific targets to hit, and coins stashed in out of the way places that you can collect. It's half Katamari-Damacy and half Marble Madness.

It's gorgeous and addicting, yet unpolished. There is no readme.txt to explain the big picture. I wanted to finish the first city and continue to the next, but I had to go find the website again (I downloaded this a couple of weeks ago) to find out that there was only one level. There's a simple arcade scoring system that I don't care a fig about. I'm not going to do it for points, I want some "You've won!" reward. There's a rudimentary story of the Blob's spaceship crashing into the city and MIB's trying to track him down. Despite that, the game never ends. I confess I didn't collect all the coins, but I did paint the entire city, hitting all the target buildings, and there was no win condition.

The reward is just as important as the obstacle. Peggle knows this. When you finish a level there are fireworks, Ode to Joy plays, and you get a slow motion closeup of the last peg you hit. I giggle everytime I see it because it's so over the top.

I was playing De Blob on the laptop in the lobby of the show this weekend and attracted a gaggle of kids looking over my shoulder. They all wanted it. Good. It's a worthy game with a very simple mechanic. Hopefully someone will hire the team of students responsible for De Blob and expand it into a full game. Until then, I have one city to paint over and over again. Maybe I'll finally get all the coins.