There’s been many times where I’ve uttered the words “this is the weirdest game I’ve ever seen.” It happened when I first played Shadow of the Colossus as I rode a horse across empty plains, unbothered by enemies as I approached a giant, moving, climbing puzzle. It happened when Superliminal twisted my mind into confusing shapes as I tried to understand its perspective-based puzzles. It even happened when I saw a trailer for Genital Jousting. Now it’s happened for possible the final time. Why? Because Blippo+ is the weirdest game I’ve ever seen.
Technically speaking, Blippo+ isn’t even a traditional game. It’s more of a 90s television simulator… now in colour! There’s no on-demand streaming here, it’s a programme guide complete with multiple TV channels to switch between. After the original “1-bit” release in black and white on Playdate, this PC and Switch version now brings more of an analogue TV aesthetic, right down to the artifacting and fuzzy video quality. And I do mean video quality, as it’s live action video of actual actors doing actual acting, but it’s all unerringly presented in the style of television from three decades ago. It’s actually incredibly impressive how perfectly they’ve nailed this aesthetic – using Blippo+ is basically indistinguishable from actual television back then, right down to scanning for channels.
Well, almost. You won’t find reruns of Friends, Fresh Prince or Star Trek Voyager here, because this is television from another planet, called Planet Blip. This is explained through the TV shows themselves, with one news segment explaining that a planet somewhere off in space seems to have activated devices called PeeDees that can receive the television signal from Planet Blip due to a fold in space. A PeeDee is apparently a smartphone-type device that is ubiquitous on Blip. It took a moment for me to realise that the planet they were referring to was Earth, and that my/our playing of this game is a part of its story. I am not sure if I mentioned this yet, but Blippo+ is weird.
Planet Blip seems to be caught in some kind of sci-fi 90s fashion vortex, with everyone having era appropriate clothing, makeup, and hairstyles… if they were appearing in Doctor Who. The TV shows are, if anything, weirder than you’re expecting. One show is a cooking show that shows you how to prepare alien fruit, complete with a cooking show voiceover explaining what to do and some good alien fruit props. Another is a scientist who can revive people from their DNA and is using it to conduct interviews that are a bit insulting, but very unsympathetic to the horrors of suddenly being revived long after your own death. Bushwalker is a first person view of walking through the great outdoors, with two hands holding a knife and a wooden axe moving at the sides of the screen. Then there’s Tantric Computing, which is on the “porn” channel which is all scrambled, but images keep making it through of a keyboard being softly stroked, a cable being inserted, or a (computer) mouse being handled whilst soft moans play in the background.
It’s just about the most surreal thing I’ve ever experienced. Hundreds of people worked on this – writers, actors, graphic designers, musicians, editors – and it’s a stunningly odd achievement. I do believe they’ve nailed what they wanted to do, from the aesthetic, to the vaguely self aware nature of the performances, the creativity on show, it all seems pretty much perfect for the niche I have to assume this is aimed at: drama kids, weirdos like me that watch too much Dropout TV, and fans of shows with rich veins of overly meta humour.
The problem is, I imagine for a general audience it all kind of blends together after a while. It’s pretty hit and miss at the best of times, but the constant stream of irreverent weirdness means it lacks the variety to keep me actually engaged. If some channels did things that took themselves seriously, others did comedy stuff, other did chat shows, there would be stuff to switch between. Back when linear TV was still the norm in my life, I wouldn’t channel surf to find things of the exact same tone as what I was already watching, I’d be looking for something different. That’s the whole point of changing the channel. Here you just hop from weird to weird, so the novelty of that runs out far too quickly. If some of the programming took itself more seriously, at least in the way that something like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room does, then the variety would go a long way.
For understandable reasons, the programmes themselves are all very short as well, perhaps up to a minute long. This makes sense, but it also limits their depth and impact – they’re over so quickly that they become transient, there’s no ads or pauses between them to leave a moment to sit with the end of a show and react to it. Of course, the constant barrage of advertisements are a scourge on humanity, but at least in the olden days when the younger generations still watched live TV they did provide a pause to reflect on what you’ve just seen, react to it, discuss it, or at least go to make a cup of tea.
