As NintendoGal readers will probably note, I’ve been very excited for the release of de Blob; I’ve had my eye on it since the early days of its conception, and my hands-on time with it at E3 exacerbated my excitement to very high levels. I’ve finally gotten my hands on the final product, and it’s just as satisfying as I had hoped it would be. Though a couple of minor control issues may get in the way on occasion, de Blob is definitely one of the best games to hit the Wii this year.

de Blob has an unassuming, simple premise. The INKT Corporation has overtaken Chroma City, stealing all its color and trapping its citizens in ink-producing suits. As Blob, a rather mysterious creature with special paint powers, you must re-paint Chroma City and drive the evil IKNT away. The gameplay is admittedly quite simple as well, which makes the allure of de Blob an even more amazing feat. About 80% of your time in the story mode is spent running into buildings and painting them funky colors, and while you’ll run into some platforming sections as well, it is close to as simple as it sounds, in essence. Developer Blue Tongue has done an amazing job making this as entertaining as they can; with each building you bump into, vivid color spreads through it from the point you touched it accompanied by a funky art style, and depending on what color you are a different musical instrument will contribute loudly to the game’s soundtrack. Each level starts out as almost entirely white, and nearly silent, and also you can tell the sun isn’t exactly shining bright. As you pick up paintbots and get to painting, however, the buildings jump out with vivid colors, and the soundtrack starts jumping, and you can truly feel Chroma City come to life.

This is one game in which production values really need to be very high, and luckily Blue Tongue has done exactly that. Even after painting your level a rainbow of randomly placed colors, including brown, the world looks brilliant and fantastic. The soundtrack is a sort of modern jazz fusion which really fits with the laid-back gameplay and loud colors, and it’s entertaining hearing different instruments come into play depending on your color; red is saxophone, blue is jazz guitar, green is electric keyboard, and brown brings in some turntable sounds. It’s surprisingly satisfying to fill up on color and go painting rows of buildings, or jumping across rooftops, because the environment responds so well; in fact, de Blob is one of a few games that manages to bring out the completionist in me like few other games can. I found that for most of the game’s ten levels, I was spending upwards of an hour in each one, painting every building I could and freeing all the Raydians for bonus points. Blue Tongue has managed to make a very simple gameplay concept extremely entertaining and has capitalized on it, something that I think more game developers could benefit from.