Bulb Boy: No words – just emotions

Hello. This is a review of a cute but nasty game, in which there is one light bulb boy, several zombie chickens, a senile grandfather, tons of crap and great pronunciation of English names. Enjoy watching/reading.

Acid-green light is burning in the windows of the light bulb house. This tiny, mischievous boy with a disproportionately large glowing head wanders alone through broken down rooms. Among the headless chickens, eating a stump of a neck and shitty monsters in masks, he is looking for where his grandfather and the dog could have disappeared, for whom… something came. A clot of unknown something (and one can expect… a lot from the game of these authors) possessed the old man, after which the grandfather himself turned into a large strange something and flew away through a hole in the ceiling, also to an unknown destination. Together with the light bulb hero, we travel through the depths of the sewer system, where we are carried away, excuse me, by shit through the toilet. We’re rolling down the monster’s esophagus, trying not to get caught by a crooked tooth or get stuck somewhere in the intestines. We also go to several more places, which in total are not much, but the game has enough.

Honestly: an indescribable feeling!

I started to tell you the story Bulb Boy – the first game of a not very famous, but very creative studio Bulbware. Polish dreamers from Krakow, as you understand, were named after their debut project. It’s clear, because the first game for developers is neither more nor less, but a calling card.

Bulb Boy appeared to the world in 2015 on PC, and in a few years reached Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch and telephone platforms. Fame came to her precisely after the release on the hybrid console – in the first year of the “owl’s” life, critics paid attention to almost any game released on it, that’s whyBulb Boy I earned my 75 points pretty quickly Metacritic (by the way, the PC version has 84).

“By the way” No. 2: The PC version feels somewhat lighter than the console version. For example, we didn’t die even once on this final boss.

Bulb Boy positioned as a https://partyspins.uk/ horror adventure. Playing as the light bulb boy, we make our way through rooms to find a pet and a relative, and along the way we explore the situation, solving small puzzles scattered around the house. In addition to puzzles, there are nasty monsters in the house (although the boy sometimes gets no better), which basically block the path. It just becomes unclear: has the family always lived like this, or just now??

Of course, the first thing that catches your eye when the camera looks into the light bulb house is the design. Style Bulb Boy balances somewhere between Edmund McMillen’s signature style and games Amanita Design, attracting like lovers Isaac, and fans too Botanicula. On the one hand, more than once it became unpleasant to play due to the amount of snot, feces and other abomination that was deliberately stuffed onto the screen. On the other hand, the drawing still came out quite cute – let’s say, throughout the game I was rather touched by the boy. The game also received a plot from the Czech studio, presented without words at all, but only through drawings illustrating the thoughts of the characters.

Of particular note is the musical accompaniment. The sound combines pleasantly with the general atmosphere of the level, creating an alarming-calm atmosphere to the right degree, while not forgetting the naughty notes. Sometimes the music contrasts nicely with the visuals, setting the game at the right pace, which feels really great.

The controls in the game, like any point-and-click quest, are minimalistic. For the “owl” from Nintendo, on which we played the game, probably even too much. It would seem that on a portable console such small cartoon horrors would work great with touch controls – but they are not here. Support for Joy-Con gyroscopes, which can easily replace a mouse, was also not delivered. Everything is offensively simple – the stick is responsible for movement, and a couple of buttons are needed to touch or take an item and get into the inventory. On a PC, by the way, everything is controlled by the usual mouse wandering around the screen.

Some rooms offer unusual puzzles. Here, for example, you need to control two characters at once.

Bulb Boy is, first and foremost, a game about solving riddles. And there are many of them here. For the most part, they are even logical, although there are situations when the authors’ idea is completely difficult to understand. But in this case, the game has a magic button that puts the boy to sleep: in the scribbles depicting his dreams, the player can find a clue. However, one rarely has to resort to such help: all riddles are solved within one game room, and on consoles, active zones are also highlighted, saving the player from pixel hunting.

Riddles are often diluted with interesting game design features. Sometimes in the story the hero takes off his bright head and attaches it to various objects or creatures. He can also hide it separately from the body or launch it far away to hide from monsters. One of the much less interesting game design features is repetitive actions. Sometimes the player is forced to do the same thing over and over again to punish a mistake, but sometimes the player has to die over and over again just to get past a difficult point.

And one more thing. You can find many references here. Which of course is fashionable and often good. For example: there is a meme in the sewer blobfish; there is the head Bender from Futurama and the skeleton of a drunkard Mickey Mouse.

Time forBulb Boy it takes an hour and a half. It may seem like not enough. But for us, who are in the mood for an easy and relaxed passage in a quiet evening, it’s just right. I think this is exactly how the developers intended the game.

Sometimes the lamp is thrown out of cruel reality into flashbacks. There you can take a break from the dirt and guts, calmly throw a ball, water the flowers.

Over time Bulb Boy begins to appear to the player as some strange world that we feel, but do not understand from the word “at all”. With such a visual style that you either immediately fall in love with it or hate it until the end of the game. The game, of course, is by no means the horror game it proudly claims to be. But this is still an unusual quest, which can be an ideal pastime for lovers of small adventure games.

Well, for those who are still interested in the review – great news! In February this year Bulbware launched a colorful website for their new game – Poopdie, which tells the story of a little worm with, let’s say, problems containing exhaust gases (bzdun he). The developers also PewDiePie somehow lured there. It’s true that it’s not yet clear what’s going on with the release date.