A Boy and His Blob

A Boy and His Blob is a modern reimagining of an older Nintendo game, in which a boy cooperates with a shapeless alien creature capable of transforming into various objects once the player offers it a specific type of jellybean. The Blob can thus turn into a ladder, an umbrella, a helicopter, a trampoline, or perhaps a hammer, and the player must combine these transformations with the boy's movement to solve environmental puzzles and progress through levels full of both platforming and purely logical passages, where multiple transformations must be timed and combined correctly in sequence. As the player progresses, they gain access to more types of jellybeans and thus new forms of the Blob, so the palette of possible solutions to individual puzzles expands along with the rising difficulty.

Visually, the game relies on a hand-drawn, fairy-tale-like look with delicate animation, which on the DS screen feels unusually poetic compared to most other titles on the platform that focus more on action. The music is quiet, atmospheric, and sensitively supports the more emotional tone of the story about the friendship between the boy and his alien companion, without slipping into excessive sentimentality. The controls combine classic platforming button movement with selecting jellybeans via the touchscreen, which remains intuitive even in more complex puzzles.

Reviews praised above all the inventive game system and the touching story, thanks to which the game found a grateful audience even among players who otherwise don't seek out logic platformers. Today it is seen as one of the more sensitively crafted titles on the DS, one that managed to combine puzzle design with an emotional story, and for many it remains a surprisingly overlooked gem in the console's catalog that deserves more attention than it received at release, especially thanks to the balanced ratio between puzzles and story passages and the gentle, non-forceful tone of the whole narrative.