I am a firm believer in the idea that there is no such thing as a perfect game. No matter how much I love a game, there’s always something to criticize. There are two games that gives me pause here though – Bejeweled and Tetris. Yeah, yeah, call me a filthy casual all you want, but hear me out; both are fun and challenging as well as endlessly replayable. Both are also about as simple as it is humanly possible to make a video game. Bejeweled has the edge here, as you’re 1 millionth move is as easy to make as your very first, but both are elegant design personified. But this isn’t a review for either of those games. No, this is a review for Raining Blobs.

Raining Blobs is not elegant design personified

Elegance isn’t even its vocabulary.

Raining Blobs is a falling brick game, but instead of going the Tetris rout it takes more from Doctor Mario. Every brick has two blocks (or blobs), each one a different color. You combine colors to clear out the space. Raining Blobs “improvement” to the formula is a stupid additional step to this. Where most games like this are based on the number of colors you have to match, here you have to connect two special blobs (marked with bright white stars) to make a group disappear. At first I thought this was kind of like how in Doctor Mario you were trying to clear out the viruses or bacteria that littered the place space, but here’s the thing – once you connect four of the same colors in Doctor Mario, they go away. You have a clear end point, sure, but you can easily free yourself from clutter if you need to.

In Raining Blobs, if the RNG does not decide to give you a star blob of the right color, you can easily find yourself with no real options. I have lost several rounds of the game without ever clearing a single color. Again, compare that to the simplicity of “make a solid line from one side of the arena to the other” or “match three or more colors” then try and find some justification for this additional complication.

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The sad thing is, that’s not even my main issue with Raining Blobs. That goes to the act of getting the damn thing started. The game has three control options, one for a controller and two for the keyboard. In order to pick the control option you want, you have to hold that configuration’s “okay” button. Except, from there on, without the game telling you, you have to use another button to navigate the rest of the menus. So for me, I used “WASD” to move the blobs, with “Space” being my “okay” and the “U” and “I” to rotate the blobs. I had to spend the first five minutes of the game figuring out why hitting “Space” kept bringing me back to the start menu before realizing that the game wanted me to press “U” after picking the control figuration. I wasn’t even playing the game at this point, I was just trying to navigate basic menus. Just…how do you fuck that up?

So what does the game have? Anime girls. You pick a character that has no impact on gameplay and a location (which I didn’t even know I was doing at first) and for the duration of the game you have that character in the background. This is pretty much just a shit anime spin off of Doctor Mario. And you thought we were joking when we said “spin offs never work”. And before anyone asks no, there isn’t any nudity. To be fair, the art isn’t awful. It’s not great and like I said the character just sits in the back ground waiting to be covered up by the blobs. But if you like underage anime girls… just leave and never speak to me or anyone I know.

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Again, once you’re in the game there isn’t a whole lot wrong, but unless you really like falling brick games and have become bard with literally every other iteration of the concept out there, I can’t recommend this one. I would rather it actually be raining blood than have to play Raining Blobs again.

 Raining Blobs was developed by Endi Milojkoski

Point of Sale: Steam

$9.99; that’s only $1.25 per anime girl. Not bad if that’s your thing… I guess.

A Review Code was Provided for Raining Blobs by Black Shell Media.