Quarter Circle Forward: Painting the Town with De Blob 2

Recently, I have desired a break from my typical slew of Action Adventure, story based, RPG element assimilated games. A much needed breather from difficult moral decisions and complicated characterizations for a simpler means of fun. So I picked up De Blob 2 for the Xbox360 and I was pleasantly surprised, but then the true disappointment hit me.

On the exterior, De Blob 2 is a platformer with a twist. Instead of simply getting from point A to point B, you have to paint things along the way to advance. It is mostly 3D, but it throws in a couple sections of 2D platforming in each stage to be trendy, and there are power ups that can be leveled up to add extra gameplay “depth.”

But buried beneath the mostly cookie cutter gameplay of De Blob 2, is an incredibly addictive musical feature. Each color in De Blob has a different distinct “sound” or instrument giving the game a brilliant synesthesia experience. As you traverse the environments and paint the town red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and brown each instrument joins into the melody resulting in the gradual composition of a funky tune. For example, painting a bench the color red will create a groovy trumpet solo over the underlying melody. Or splattering a building with brown produces a cool DJ record scratch. It is simple, yet addicting. You begin with a quiet and empty black and white city canvas and slowly, everything you touch is brought to life with color and sound.

The interaction of visuals and music in games can be absolutely magical and De Blob 2 truly posesses that spirit. There is this pleasingly unique level of control created by elegantly composing music via button presses and seeing real-time how your involvement effects the in-game environment. From something as basic as seeing a “Perfect” flash on the screen in Dance Dance Revolution or gathering a large following of space dancers in Space Channel 5 to something more visually complex such as Rez's fusion of shooter and sound: impacting a combination of rhythm and visuals is oddly addictive.

Unfortunately in De Blob 2, the potentially brilliant freedom of color and sound exploration is squandered by some horrible pitfalls. First, there is a tacked on time limit for each level that ideally would be an added difficulty to an inherently easy game, but realistically ends up hindering the gameplay. Often, I found myself getting absorbed into the scenery, exploring, and leaving a rainbow trail behind me, obsessively painting each tree and stop sign with a satisfying burst of sound. And then my enthusiasm was quickly stomped by the depleting clock ticking away at the top of the screen, and I was pulled back to the main objectives. Second, the controls are absolutely mediocre and the camera panning is awful which results in some unnecessarily frustrating platforming moments. Finally, the pace is significantly too slow. It is horribly frustrating trying to move to paint the next object, but because of the sluggish movement, you lose the impending crescendo and simply can't keep up with the lively beats.

It is upsetting, because it feels like De Blob 2 missed the point of what exactly makes its concept fun and lost an incredible opportunity to create a genuinely unique game experience. And the music is good too. Oh well, I guess we still have Child of Eden!

Disclaimer: I haven't played the original De Blob, and I played De Blob 2 on the Xbox360 so I don't know how it stands up to the original or the Wii/PS3 versions.