The Indie Informer

Congratulations children of the ’90s, we are now old enough that our childhood nostalgia is the subject of throwback games. To be honest, #Blud does a really good job of capturing the essence of cartoons like The Powerpuff Girls, Hey Arnold!, and Dexter’s Laboratory.

The colors are bright, but the topics can get quite dark — and the adults around the young protagonists don’t seem to be any help. The tongue-in-cheek writing is both biting and ludicrous. The visuals are pure Saturday morning. However, this implacable facade rests on top of narrative and combat structures, which don’t totally hold it up.

I’ve traveled four hours into #Blud’s trail of death and destruction. The first was unqualified joy, setting up the perfectly odd characters, surprisingly bloody stakes, and the glow of fantastically replicated callbacks. These jokes are for a very particular age demographic, and I happen to fall right into it. I’ll tell you I was not prepared to get an offhand Stacy’s Mom reference in dialouge.

Our hero is the youthful Becky Brewster, who has just moved to her absent mother’s hometown. Her dad, an engineer with Perch — a thinly-veiled stand-in for every real-world tech corporation you can think of — is cheesy but loving. He gifts her a top-of-the-line Perch phone before her first day of school, which acts as the game’s quest log and also allows me to take unlimited selfies. I’m on a mission to get a picture with everyone in the town, and I have already nabbed an achievement for snapping a picture with every kind of adorable animal.

As the last minutes of that first hour wind out, I’ve uncovered a dark secret hidden in the sleepy town’s bowls. Not only that, it seems I have a long history with the impending doom and, with help, am the only one who can fight back the tide. The character’s relationships, motivations, and path all seem laid out, and I’m ready to venture on.

But the cartoon’s narrative turns increasingly into a sketch the father in I go. Perhaps taking from animation’s episodic nature, the story cuts threads to jump wildly forward. Did anyone notice that I fought a demon blood goat in the school’s hockey field? I’ll never really know because the story jarringly skips ahead a few months. What have the villains been plotting during this time? Has the town become aware that evil roams the streets just after dark? The lingering questions are unfullfilling.

This might be more tolerable if the gameplay wasn’t already poking at my enjoyment. Ealy in my second hour, I ran out of the ammo that I needed to take on an advanced enemy. So, I trudged tediously through my neighborhood, the nearby town, and the woods beyond desperately seeking it.

This only magnified the ensuing combat’s small but irritating issues — like taking damage by simply touching a baddie or not being able to pull out of a combo to avoid an attack. I have hope that some of these will get smoothed over when I earn more attack-boosting runes or when I can fast travel throughout the world’s discrete areas.

#Blud is, largely a monster-hunting romp down memory lane. Its aesthetic and humor is likely to ensnare anyone who fondly remembers the game’s inspirations. The contemporary commentary is sure to win it over plenty of fans of any age as well. While the gameplay isn’t as graceful as its other facets, it’s a fun adventure so far.