by Remember Minesweeper? Older PC users probably recall looking for hidden mines within tiled grids in that pre-installed Windows classic. What passed for excitement then was watching the grids open up when clicked, displaying numbers that gave you a rough distance (but not directional location) of the nearest mines. It was a semi-blind guessing game, and if you hit a mine, it was game over. No, it wasn’t exactly thrilling.
Playing Blip Blup, a decidedly sleeker, more interesting, and modern puzzle game, it’s hard not to have Windows 3.1 flashbacks. Here you also have tiled grids that – when touched – send out a pulse wave that expands from your finger tap outward, sending color in every mappable direction. Thankfully, solving puzzles by coloring in grids is both more interesting and unsurprisingly much brainier than in Minesweeper.
Blip Blup’s initial puzzles only ask you to fill in each level’s grid within an allotted number of moves, but the design doesn’t waste much time with easy stuff. The first complication introduces white tiles into the mix, blocking the spread of a pulse wave like sonar around a barrier. Suddenly, filling grids means waves must be activated at strategic angles, bouncing their paths off of barriers to most effectively fill a space. Wave-activated switch tiles come later, which change from white to color and stop a wave dead in its tracks when not filled in.
Meanwhile you must contend with tricky dangling geometric pieces (How can you color them without wasting moves?), increasingly irregular level patterns, and some varying difficulty spikes – not to mention tiles that push your wave in non-negotiable directions, instant-death tiles, and even forbidden, untappable tiles. Like Blip Blup’s sharply understated aesthetic, the game itself breathes efficiency. The deeper you go, the more you’ll have to exercise your brain, strategically playing out chain reactions before even making a move. Needless to say, it’s not a game that rewards you much for blind trial and error.
The bottom line. Blip Blup is a very good puzzler for abstract visual thinkers, even if the difficulty spikes can be tough.
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