I still remember when I saw The Blob. Not the original film, the 1988 remake. I was probably around ten years old, and we were having a Christmas party. The big kids had gone off into a separate room to watch horror movies. I came in right as what I call âThe Yo-Yo Sceneâ was happeningâa guy looks up, and fastened to the ceiling is The Blob itself, with a half-melted dude hanging out of it. It was the most horrifying, nightmare-inducing thing Iâd ever seen. I would never think of blobs the same way again.
Until Mutant Blobs Attack, that is. The new downloadable game for the PS Vita is so delightful, funny, and smart that itâs made me forget all about the ghastly pink flesh-eater from my childhood.
The full name of Mutant Blobs Attack is actually Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack! but Iâm going to go ahead and call it Mutant Blobs Attack and hope youâll forgive me. The reason for the extended name is that the game is actually second in a series from Drinkbox Studios, the first being the PSN downloadable Tales from Space: About a Blob
WHY: Mutant Blobs Attack is a creative, funny, and welcomely challenging puzzle game with an impressive supply of smart ideas.
Mutant Blobs Attack!
Developer: Drinkbox Studios
Platforms: PlayStation Vita
Released: February 22 (U.S. and Europe)
Type of game: Humorous 2D side-scrolling puzzle/platformer based around physics puzzles and starring a grumpy mutant blob.
What I played: Played through seven of the eight worlds, replayed several levels multiple times to try to get all of the collectibles.
My Two Favorite Things
Blowing through six smart puzzles in about three minutesâ time.
Realizing I was laughing after each death, rather than feeling frustrated.
My Two Least-Favorite Things
The music can start to grate after a while.
A few sections, notably the first motion-controlled rolling bit, can feel cheap.
Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes
âLike Katamari and Rampage had a baby.â
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
âA concise but compelling case for the Vita as a distinctive gaming platform. No seriously!â
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
âIt made me weirdly hungry.â
-Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku.com
Mutant Blobs Attack is a side-scrolling puzzle/platformer that relies heavily on physics puzzles and tightly-packed level design. You play as a green, cyclopean blob that has escaped from a lab and wants to go⊠home? Out for dinner? Itâs not entirely clear.
Basically, you spend the game on a classic monster-movie rampage, and in order to rampage properly, youâll need to eat and eat and eat. The more objects you eat, the bigger you get; sometimes the levels will have âcorksâ blocking your way which you can only pass once youâve hit a certain growth threshold. Eat enough stuffâsome combination of food, trash, junk, and sometimes peopleâand youâll get big enough to proceed.
The whole story is played for laughs. It features a winning, paper-cutout animation style and groovy, 1950âs sci-fi go-go music. The story has no text and only a few very short cutscenes, but it still manages to spin an entertaining yarn. Thatâs because the environments are smartly designed to tell you where you are and whyâyou begin on a college campus before making your way through a town and onto a rocket into space, then to the moon, then back to earth. Thereâs a nice sense of progression to the backdrops, and the story feels like just enough to let you understand whatâs going on but not so much that itâs ever distracting.
Mutant Blobs Attack is not an easy game. In fact, it can be a right slap in the face at times. Itâs never face-crushingly, Vita-throwingly hard (mostly due to forgiving checkpoints), but it has a bracing, cold difficulty that feels like a welcome kick after the coddling of so many similar games. The first level was a piece of cakeâI ate some junk, I pulled a cork, I flowed through some drains⊠and then on the second level, I was faced with instakill moving lasers. Woah! Things only get more difficult from there. But while Iâve died a whole lot, Iâve never felt punished for dying, and Iâve figured out most of the puzzles in a few tries.
The Blob has a limited but highly versatile move-set: It can jump, dive-bomb, perform wall-jumps, and use magnetism to pull or push him self away from certain metal surfaces. In some select sections, it can also fly, with the shoulder buttons used to fire up a sort of afterburner. Wonderfully, these moves are used very creatively by the designers, and youâll have to push The Blob to its limits to solve some of the trickier puzzles.
While the art-style may occasionally call to mind the Metroidvainian Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, the puzzles in Mutant Blobs Attack are actually much craftier. Rather than require you to learn how to use an ever-growing, complicated set of tools, the gameâs puzzles are entirely designed around creative use of those few, established abilities. One minute, youâll be using magnetic push to flip yourself through a series of spiked walls, the next youâll be dive-bombing down ahead of a laser so that you can take a corner fast enough to get out of the way.
https://lastchance.cc/insanely-twisted-shadow-planet-takes-you-on-a-weird-wi-5830479%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
It all feels great to play. The Blob has heft and weight, and moves slightly differently depending on how much itâs eaten in the level. Itâs a squishy, joyfully bouncy character to control, sometimes flattening itself to squeeze through tiny drainpipes, other times bouncing over hapless human beings like a murderous bowling ball. The game also uses the Vitaâs touch-screen smartly; as a platformer, it certainly benefits from having a dedicated d-pad and joystick, but using a touch-screen in tandem with traditional controls really does feel like the best of both worlds. Far more than the shoehorned efforts of some of the bigger-budget Vita launch titles, Mutant Blobs Attack feels like a game that is uniquely âVita.â
Itâll creep up on you like a slinking clump of flesh-eating goo.
Several levels change things up by giving players a top-down control and having them use the accelerometer to roll The Blob through a maze while avoiding deadly pitfalls. The first one of these was a frustrating drag, as I immediately thought, âOh, no. Tell me theyâre not going to blow it with bad motion controls!â Fortunately, the level wound up being very short, and later motion-controlled levels are fun, and mostly remove the irritating holes and difficulty of the first maze. In fact, several of them pay a direct homage to the Katamari games, as youâll find yourself a tiny blob, rolling about a room and eating bits and pieces until youâre so big you can eat objects that were previously gigantic barriers. (Also, this is all happening in what appears to be red/blue anaglyph 3D. I didnât ask.)
Sly references and environmental humor abound in Mutant Blobs Attack, shout-outs to other indie game developers, movie and game references, and even a few direct gameplay callouts to other games, one of which is so funny that I wouldnât dare spoil it for you. Itâs all very winning, and combines with the 50âs style, goofy soundtrack, and the zany violence to give things a distinctly Marvin the Martian vibe.
Itâs all about the little touchesâthe way The Nlobâs eye gazes balefully out at you and moves around as you do, the goofy sounds that the humans make whenever you eat them, the way an audience bursts into applause whenever you grow to a new size. (And hey, Escape Plan does that too. Hmm. Maybe game developers are actually listening to Stephen.)
https://lastchance.cc/i-would-rather-be-applauded-than-achieve-5860488%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Every puzzle gives way to three new ones at a relentless pace, and no two puzzles are exactly alike. Iâve yet to feel as though developers have run out of ideasâone second Iâm climbing walls and timing jumps, the next Iâm navigating a maze inside of a giant rolling ball, working my way to an exit while avoiding oncoming acid. Then suddenly, a race against a descending wall of lasers, followed by a flying level, followed by flinging myself through a free-fall down a spike-lined chute. Slow-moving timed puzzles give way to reaction-based jumping at the blink of an eye, before merging into touch-screen finagling and black-hole dodging. It never gets boring.
The puzzlesâ solutions are as creative as the puzzles themselvesâtime and again I thought I was stuck only to realize some new way that I could use one of the four or five moves that I learned in the first few levels. Each level is short and to the point tight, well-structured in its design.
Mutant Blobs Attack is charming yet diabolical, funny yet hardcore, difficult and rewarding in equal measure. Itâll creep up on you like a slinking clump of flesh-eating goo, patiently waiting for you to wander beneath its maw, ready to dissolve you into a bloody paste of laughing good times.
Wait, erm⊠that didnât quite come out how I intended. Anyway! You wonât see this game coming, and before too long youâll realize that youâve been sucked in, determinedly pushing and pulling yourself through challenge after challenge, a crease on your brow and a smile on your face.
