Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack

The best praise I can give Mutant Blobs Attack, though it's perhaps the biggest bummer as well, is that it reminds me a lot of the gone but not forgotten TV show Futurama. Futurama mined a lot of comedy from a classic sci-fi premise of aliens and the wonders of the future, told variously through the filters of the early 2000s when the show was made and decades throughout the 20th century as the basis of many of the sci-fi tropes it tackled and its overall retro look. I used the word "zeerust" to describe Mutant Blobs Attack last time: it's a made up word (from The Meaning of Liff, a book written by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams and QI co-creator John Lloyd, who conceived the neologism from a town name) that describes a future of the past. Say, what the folks from the mid-20th century envisioned what the 21st century might look like. Some of the technology they predicted is still years and years away from us even now, most notably interstellar travel and extraterrestrial colonies, while many others we presently enjoy (like this internet thing here) were not predicted at all, and there's a distinct fingerprint of the prevailing sensibilities and fashions of that decade that makes its future-that-may-have-been look simultaneously dated. Likewise, the art direction and music of Mutant Blobs Attack evokes various decades of sci-fi, presenting a world that has an elevator to the moon but still has computers the size of rooms. It's a tongue-in-cheek attempt to recreate the zeerust of a 1950s B-movie about a blob devouring the world in the distant future where we have let our amoral experiments run amok. (But if I'm being honest, what really drives the comparison home between this game and Futurama is that they both feature a green "Horrible Gelatinous Blob" with an irritated expression that keeps eating people out of habit. Similar cultural DNA, I suspect.)

Anyway, I figured I'd open with a clarification for something I wrote last time because there's not a whole lot else to add about this game. My appraisal of it yesterday is still every bit as applicable now that I've beaten the game: it's an excellent puzzle-platformer that never runs out of ideas for various physics and precision-based conundrums, all of which is anchored by the game's core mechanic of putting on mass by eating objects that are smaller than you, as that then lets you eat larger objects including whatever blockade is preventing you from moving forward. The game certainly doesn't pull any punches as it goes on, and there are times where I've died multiple times at the same spot within seconds of respawning, creating a Super Meat Boy style medley of squelching sound effects. The game is very generous with its checkpoints, however, and it's very hard to get frustrated at any given puzzle given how quickly you respawn and how little repetition there is to suffer through. There's also a self-destruct if you're attempting to get one of the game's point tally medals and have missed a few collectibles, provided you hit it before the next checkpoint is reached.

Collectible chasing is a little more exasperating because the game is very linear and, as stated, checkpoints frequently and usually after hitting a point of no return. The stages themselves, though, are fairly brisk and rarely take more than five minutes to complete, and you can whiz through them quickly once you've ascertained how to solve their environmental puzzles. I appreciate that while the requirements for the best result - a gold medal - are steep, it's never to the extent that you need to grab absolutely everything. When you're being thrown into fast-paced scenarios like a forced scrolling section with an instant-death laser beam following closely behind you, stopping for every little blue dot is the last thing you want to do.

One other game comparison I'd like to make before wrapping this up is to Rabbids Go Home. Besides the similar emphasis on finding objects and increasing the size of your haul, as well as a similar chaotic comic sensibility, there's a distinct secondary story going on with the humans in the background. Humans, in both cases, are treated as "others": we see ourselves as another sentient species might see us, flawed and stupid and violent and incoherent and panicky. The Blob initially escapes his laboratory imprisonment because of the brutal testing they put the blobs through, and is constantly avoiding the traps the humans have set to stop it. As it gets ever bigger and starts eating humans along with everything else, humanity gets more and more desperate to stop it, including sticking it in a rocket and firing that rocket at the sun. The blob takes all this in stride and, without giving too much away, proves to be more than the humans can handle. My favorite hilariously dark moment comes right at the end of the game: After devouring an entire city, the Blob delves underground and begins to eat the Earth from the inside out. As you escape into space to start munching down on the planet's surface, a group of rockets fire off in every direction. They look like the guided rockets that the humans have been firing at you, but they're actually colony ships built to escape an Armageddon - in this case, the player character's voracious rampage. If you're fast enough, you can vindictively eat every last one of them and cause the human race to go completely extinct. It feels like something right out of the alternate ending of "Little Shop of Horrors", and the perfect way to put a cap on the game's extended B-movie homage.

The Verdict: The game's beaten, so I gotta move on. An easy recommend for fans of smaller and less complicated games like this. Five stars.

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