After Muramasa left me lukewarm I was eager to see A Boy and His Blob try its hand at 2D goodness on the Wii. I never played the original game beyond renting it one weekend long ago, and like many NES games of the day I got stuck, ragequit and never looked back. It was obtuse and infuriating. This new version frustrates as well, but on the other end of the difficulty spectrum. It feels too easy, and as a whole it feels like an opportunity was missed.

A Boy and His Blob‘s title is about all the exposition you get — it’s about a boy his blob. And that’s about all you need really. There’s little development beyond that. However, I wonder, given the emphasis on the pair getting through rough situations together I’m disappointed the developers didn’t go to the lengths of Braid, Portal or Ico, similarly minimalist games that really got you to care for the characters. The famous “hug” button is about all the character interaction we get. It initiates a cute and heartwarming animation and voice sample, but that’s it. The blob is more of a tool, a toy, for the kid to use to get more stuff to put in his tree house.

That’s the goal of the game: To collect things for Boy’s house, which show up in a trophy display sort of way. Walking up to them activates behind-the-scenes videos of the development team and concept artwork, which is nice but it’s not enough incentive to collect all the treasures in each level. There are three treasures in each level to discover, though after a while I forgot about them and concentrated on just getting to the goal since solving the game’s puzzles gets tiresome after a while.

Which is odd considering the puzzles have obvious solutions. Often there are signs with the solution on them — a picture of the type of bean you have to feed your blob. Puzzles get complex when you take aiming the arc of your throw into the equation — hold a button, aim your bean and toss it somewhere for your blob to go eat and turn into something useful. This requires a good deal of patience, especially when the puzzle-solving takes longer than you want, due to the game’s slow pace or some finicky nonsense involving some of the blob’s transformations. For instance, using the jack drags the game to a crawl as it often requires pixel-perfect precision that can be a bother to perfect. Reverting the blob to its default mode then aiming a bean so it lands exactly where the game wants you to put it can get exceedingly tedious.

The music is fine background stuff, the sound effects sensible with a few exceptions. The blob makes heavy foot step noises which never made sense to me. The voice acting is cute, the boy’s voice provided by a son of one of the developers. The graphics are aces, very well-animated, by far the game’s greatest aspect. Many of the blobby enemies are squeezably cute. Much of the game’s presentation is solid, with an animated intro when the game starts up. It looks cheap-ish, though the effort is nice.

Which sums up A Boy and His Blob. It feels very much like a budget title, which is okay but, like Muramasa, it doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot there to keep me in my seat. And similar to Muramasa, I’d love to see what these developers, with their great love for 2D gameplay, do next