Cruise Elroy

Wow, did I ever need the A Boy and His Blob remake.

Even though I spend the majority of my waking hours reading about, discussing, analyzing and testing video games, I’ve had little interest in actually playing them lately (perhaps you’ve noticed). A Boy and His Blob, for whatever reason, shook me from my listlessness; I plowed through to 100% completion within a week and a half.

I had Sega consoles growing up, so I didn’t encounter the NES Boy and His Blob until college. A friend of mine remembered it as a childhood favorite: “This white blob follows you around, and when you feed it jelly beans it turns into stuff — like a ladder or a trampoline!” I agreed that it sounded awesome, and we resolved to play through it one day.

When we did, though, we found it to be a frustrating experience. The controls were clumsy, the difficulty curve was brutal, and that awesome jelly bean mechanic was overshadowed by tedious precision platforming. The game ostensibly encourages experimentation, but the limited lives and jelly beans meant constant restarts that dampened our enthusiasm. By the end, my friend had removed his rose-colored glasses; we reevaluated A Boy and His Blob as a fun idea with a flawed execution.

The brilliance of the Boy and His Blob remake is that it is, itself, rose-colored. It exists in reality the way the original exists in your head. It is nostalgia made manifest.

That’s not to say that you need to have played the NES version to appreciate this one. Between the hand-drawn art style, the younger and more endearing protagonist, the adorable “hug blob” button which serves no gameplay purpose, and the pleasant score, A Boy and His Blob on the Wii is charming in a way that the original never was. Like the best modern Nintendo games, it has an aura of sentimentality that evokes a simpler time.

It doesn’t hurt that the game is much easier to play now. There are unlimited jelly beans, unlimited lives, and frequent save points. You no longer have to memorize which jelly bean flavor goes with which tool. It’s now easy to place a bean with pinpoint precision. You also only receive a limited subset of jelly beans for each level, so there is less blind experimentation — a change I initially hated but grew to appreciate towards the end.

I was less fond of the new enormous signs with instructions on which tool to use. (Next to a high ledge there might be a sign with a picture of a ladder, for example.) Given that the choice of jelly beans is already restricted, it seems unnecessary to offer such obvious hand-holding, especially later in the game when the player could be reasonable expected to figure things out herself. I get that the game is meant to more accessible now, but that was one concession I could have done without.

The level design and organization take a leaf out of Braid’s book: a hub world grants access to individual levels, each of which has several discrete puzzles, some lightweight platforming, and three collectible items. The puzzles themselves, though, are pretty mild compared to Braid; it wasn’t until the last few levels that I couldn’t immediately discern the solution. There were a couple of tricky boss battles, and some of the unlockable bonus levels brought me close to frustration, but on the whole Blob is a smooth ride.

Perhaps that approachability is what drew me in to begin with; it offered a much-needed reminder of how it feels to invest oneself in a game. Beyond the warm nostalgia and gentle brain-teasers, I owe A Boy and His Blob a debt of gratitude for rekindling my interest.