Blu is an action platformer. You play as the titular Blu, a young… person. They’re dressed like a ninja, for reasons, and they’re taking their test to become the new guardian. The previous guardian, a monk, has trained Blu so that they can become the next one. The demo dealt with the test and only that. Though this test goes to hell about halfway through, big shocker, otherwise it would be very very boring.

The combat in this is fairly simple, you have a standard attack, a strong attack which takes time to do, a block button which also allows you to dodge, a jump, and movement. You can obtain money from money bags and use that to buy different shields, there’s two or three in the game, or buy weapons, there’s at least one scimitar, and a large sword or mace like object. At first you only have your fists and a buckler though. If you move while blocking you dodge in that direction. When you pick up a weapon your attack and strong attack change to a degree, not sure it actually does any extra damage or anything.

There are some issues with the game from what was shown in the demo. The first two will be minor issues and then two major ones.The first is jumping, and especially double jumping, which you get halfway through the demo, jumping can feel weird, it’s a bit floaty which is fine okay. However, there’s two types of jumps, excluding jumping and double jumping, pushing the jump button is a short jump and holding the jump button creates a high jump, these are finicky and end up feeling rather weird. The other minor issue is during combat some enemies have shields, I found this specific issue to be most common with the skeleton enemies found in the second of the two levels of the demo. They have shields and will raise them, and if you attack they immediately raise them, I assume you’re supposed to dodge behind them and hit them but by the time you finish your dodge, they’ve already turned around and blocked. This led to me just walking while constantly attacking til I walked far enough into their square that I hit their back instead of their shield and that feels kind of cheap and not the way you’re supposed to fight them, but they play extremely defensive and react immediately. Making it to where they couldn’t turn and block faster than you could dodge, turn, and attack, would be nice, or make them not as defensive. The other two types of shield users didn’t block as constantly, so they were more easily killed.

The major issues I found were all other combat issues. The first is that there are multiple types of enemies, one of them is this really large enemy who uses a giant chunk of wood, basically think of cyclopes and a chunk of a tree. The problem is, this guy is fast, and he’s strong. He can hit you which causes you to slam into the ground and he can keep doing that before you’re able to hop back up let alone hop up and dodge away. I had numerous times where just one of these big guys wiped out most of my health before it stopped doing it and I was able to get away. You get health potions but not a ton of them, this wasted them and that was really. Another issue is that two enemies can be in the same block IE they can overlap each other When you attack, you hit ONE, when you do that the other will hit you and if it does the one that you hit will hit you, and then they’ll stun-lock you by hitting between each other’s attacks to keep you unable to move. It behaves just like the big guy, this usually happens with smaller ones thankfully, however, they’re faster, their attacks do less damage but they attack about twice as fast and when one isn’t hitting you the other is. Having most of your life drained because the game decides to stun lock you is some massive bullshit and no one likes it in ANY game. The best way to deal with this stuff is to make the big guy hit slower as happens in most games, and to let you hit as many enemies as are in range of your weapon whether they’re overlapping each other or not. As for fixing the jump, I’m not sure how to fix that, it just feels off to me, I’m not a big platforming girl I’m not particularly familiar with how to fix them as a result.

Beyond those issues, the game was decent, it’s nothing amazing but it does a good job. I like Blu’s design even if it’s a bit weird that they’re a ninja who trained under a monk in a normal village. The last fight of the demo was really fun and kind of hard. Moving around was really cool as each area was sizable, and let you collect stuff, however the environments could use some sprucing up to look better, particularly the first of the two areas of the game. It does need some loading screens between places or needs to be optimized or something because it runs hard on my computer even though it’s, and no offense to the developer, not that impressive graphically or complex or anything like that, it doesn’t feel like it should be running my PC as hard as it is. But again, it’s not a bad game, it’s an okay game, and not every game needs to be the best game in the world.

Blu is currently being developed by Damian Robinet of MyOwnGames Only for Dummies.

Point of Sale: The game will be released seemingly in 2022 on both itch.io and Steam.

The main game doesn’t have a price point yet as it’s still, at least, a year-ish off.

A demo of the game was provided by the dev.

darkmikasonfire thinks if you like straight forward action platformers this might be something to keep your eyes on, otherwise, they’ll likely be doing a review of it when it’s close to launch to give you more information about it.