2025-10-15

Blippo+

FMV games usually try to have some form of interaction, but Blippo+ doesn’t even bother. It’s a simulation of cable TV: a handful of channels, all with their own programming, which you can surf through at will. The objective of the game is to just watch all the shows. Making progress means watching more shows. This is really stretching the definition of a “game”, but it’s better as a software than as a TV show or webseries.

Surfing channels awoke some ancient habits in my brain. Flipping past boring crap to catch a certain show just as its starting feels way too rewarding for how low-effort it is. Of course, everything has the pacing and vibe of old cable TV, with lots of fluff despite the 1 minute show length. Telefantasy Studios produced all the video, they specialize in using old analog TV tech, and it definitely looks better than some cheap Adobe plugin. Acting, sets, and writing were passionately subpar TV slop, which makes for an interesting platform to tell a story.

There is a story to Blippo+, it develops over the course of ~7 hours of “game"“play”, spread out across the different shows and channels. It’s not hard to miss: half the shows mention current events, and you have to watch most of them to unlock the next programming block. You also get emails in-game that nudge you towards the story if you’re really that dense. By the midpoint of the game, I was excitedly tuning in to specific shows just to learn new developments, but these developments were all filtered down to the shallow brainlessness of cable TV. It’s abstracted storytelling, constantly distracting you with something more quippy. The whole world is intentionally hidden behind simulacra, becoming increasingly apparent as shows refuse to say anything meaningful.

There is a story to Blippo+, and I can’t write more without major spoilers, so consider this a warning. If the previous paragraphs didn’t say it clearly enough, this game is one of the most interesting things I’ve played all year, and I can easily recommend it to anyone. This game might go next to my “ask me about LOOM” and “ask me about UPLINK” buttons that I wear on my shirt at all time.

Okay so here’s the story: Blippo+ is sci-fi, it’s a planet similar to Earth which is basically controlled by TV. They united all countries and deleted capitalism in order to watch more TV, which they broadcast so hard it goes into space. There’s a nearby wormhole that opens up, which the Blippians call The Bend, that has Earth on the other side. You, the player of the game, are receiving that signal and that’s all you get. Of course, they very quickly decide to try sending people through The Bend, which very quickly results in the Bendonauts disappearing without a trace. This coincides with the appearance of Michael Zero (she/her) who only speaks in broken metaphors. The contrast between clean, easily digestible TV speak and whatever Mike Zero has to say kinda breaks some of the Blippians, and inserts a lot of chaos into the apparent utopia they got going on.

But, remember, you are only seeing what they show on TV. In our Western world where free speech (or at least, controlled opposition) is sacred, it’s inevitable for our media to be “why everything sucks” all the time. Blippo+ makes no references towards any injustices happening behind the scenes, and its entire cast is celebrities who may already be living in a fake upper class world. There’s more to dig here, you can do that if you want.

Ultimately, a lot of the Blippians decide they wanna go through The Bend, too, and the narrative builds this up as a climax. But you only get to see what they show on TV, and you only get to see the TV from Planet Blip. Once everyone leaves, there’s no one left to make TV for you. So you don’t get to see what’s beyond The Bend. You just get credits, and outtakes.

Spare my fart sniffing for a second, but what if the credits and outtakes are also a part of the story? There’s a credits option on the menu from the start of the game, but the last chapter has each show playing their credits, and showing its actors out of character. The menu’s narrators acknowledge the game they’re in, and so is the last email you get. After crossing The Bend, every single avenue for storytelling starts breaking the 4th wall. It’s my conclusion that The Bend is a physical representation of the 4th wall. They send TV through it in order to reach you, and when they pass through it, they just become cast & crew, Earthlings, making a silly FMV game in California. I’ll back my case up with a paraphrase: one of the characters questions the reality of Planet Blip itself, saying “I know The Bend is real, and I know Mike Zero is real”. Assuming Mike did cross the 4th wall in the wrong direction, she would become incomprehensible in a Plato’s Allegory of the Cave sort of way.

And that’s not just a game theory that is a god damn thesis. Is this not what media is to us, right now? When you distill facts to headlines you lose so much information, you run into these simulacra problems. Our whole country is filled with people who treat media as reality, so lost in the sauce we consciously decide what kind of bias we want to be subjected to. Blippo+, refreshingly, doesn’t care about the symptom of bias, and instead attacks the inherent fakeness of anything that pretends to represent a reality, even one that is not our own. I’ve scrolled Steam reviews disappointed about the abrupt ending, but a “go outside” moment is necessary to drive the point home.

Anyways yeah, 3/3 very very very very easy to recommend but almost impossible to describe without an autistic ramble.