B.L.O.B.

Gravity plays a pretty important role in platformers, especially in those that require you to perform daring jumps and cheat death with every leap. On the other hand, there are also those that allow you to switch gravity on or off, which adds another layer of complexity on top of it all. Hence, a simple concept such as gravity can have serious ramifications if it’s not implemented right.

B.L.O.B. is a puzzle platformer that emphasizes on gravity and it even integrates it as a gameplay mechanic, in the sense that you must use it in order to complete the levels. It’s not the most ingenious idea out there, but at least it really puts your mind to work, especially since you have to think fast and realize how the change in gravity direction is going to affect your character.

You play the role of a colorful blob trying to reach the end of each stage, but your only power is to move around very slowly. Thankfully, the environment does most of the job for you, because you can walk through certain arrows and watch the gravity change direction. Naturally, the direction of the gravity follows the arrow, so it should be pretty intuitive, at least in theory.

There are all sorts of traps you have to watch out for, including spikes that kill instantly, as well as guns that shoot bullets at certain time intervals. It gets trickier and trickier to avoid these traps later on, especially since the gravity changes get wilder and more sudden. Speaking of which, the whole screen rotates whenever the gravity changes, which adds one more layer of confusion.

As for the graphics, there are only solid colors and a few simple objects, so there’s obviously not much to see while you are tackling the traps. On the other hand, you’ll be too busy surviving, so it doesn’t really matter how everything looks. The controls are responsive and accurate, which is exactly what you want in a fast-paced platformer.

B.L.O.B. is still a jam game, so it obviously has a lot of missing elements. Even so, you can have a lot of fun with it, or even rage quit because of the high difficulty level.