A Boy and His Blob, the 2009 reboot of the 1989 classic, arrives on Nintendo Switch in “fall 2021”.
WayForward has been around for a long time. It’s best known for its own Shantae series, of course, but did you also know the California-based developer has made licensed games for such varied franchises as SpongeBob SquarePants, X-Men, Barbie, Thor, Aliens, Scooby-Doo, Transformers, Despicable Me, Batman, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and The Mummy?
Some of WayForward’s best non-Shantae work, though, comes in the form of remasters and continuations of existing video game series, including River City, Double Dragon, and even Silent Hill. And the best one of those? It’s the 2009 reimagining of 1989 NES classic, A Boy and His Blob.
Around that time, other challengers to Mario’s crown were aiming for speed and/or attitude to try and win the youth market. (With varying degrees of success; Sonic was good, for instance, but the likes of Zool and Cool Spot were very, very bad.)
A Boy and His Blob took a different path. Instead of high-speed action and Bart Simpson quips, this gentle puzzle platformer channelled ET and Hayao Miyazaki for a gentle, beautiful puzzle adventure about the friendship between, well, a boy and his blob.
To progress, you (the boy) feed the blob various coloured jelly beans, which imbue your gelatinous friend with different abilities in order to navigate the game’s puzzles and environments. And it was all just so charming, it was a difficult game not to love.
Released for the Wii in 2009, with subsequent ports to the PS4, PS Vita, Xbox One, PC and mobile, it’s a wonder that the magical combination of WayForward and A Boy and His Blob didn’t do better. Don’t get me wrong – the game was well-received and you can’t call being ported to every platform going a failure by any stretch. But we might have expected to see a sequel by now.
Instead, we’ll just have to settle for A Boy and His Blob making its way onto another platform. This particular platform, though? It’s almost unbelievable it’s taken so long.
Published by Ziggurat Interactive, A Boy and His Blob (2009) is coming to Nintendo Switch in “fall 2021” which, we’re presuming, means it should be out in the next month or two.
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