Bloop: Reloaded Review - Fun with water

Bloop: Reloaded by 2SD is a physics puzzle game involving trying to get liquid into a potion bottle. You would think this would be simple, but apparently an alchemist in a unnamed fantasy world never learned to pour with his hands. It instead revolves around drawing lines on the screen to control the liquid to make it it fall into the vial. Bloop: Reloaded is colorful, upbeat and in general has an entirely whimsical experience.

It keeps it extremely simple at the beginning of the game, often times needing just a few lines and a little bit of pushing in order to complete every puzzle. After a few starting levels it very quickly starts to showcase new mechanics and complexity. The early puzzles can be done in a few minutes, the later ones start to have multiple steps, slowly adding more time and effort to finish each level. Bloop: Reloaded tends to favor throwing new ideas at you every other level and seeing how you figure out how to make it work in that instant.

Needing to mix liquids, anti-gravity, gravity is reversed, portals that maintain speed after going through them, and other different puzzle mechanics come in and leave after only for a level or two before introducing a new one. Bloop: Reloaded creates a constant new situation for better or worse, never letting a single idea stay for very long. It often times feels as if you are learning a mechanic just to discard it almost entirely five minutes later.

Bloop: Reloaded is a puzzle game that really wants you to try and brute force the majority of the puzzles, with the main mechanic outside of drawing the lines being the ability to temporarily grab the liquid with your cursor. Bloop: Reloaded doesn't seem to mind if you just create a pool for the liquid to land into, and drag the liquid from there to the solution in a slow but efficient method. This does mean that there are definitely multiple solutions to every problem, but Bloop: Reloaded also becomes a game where just beating your head into the wall will eventually crack the wall.

It is a tricky mix that for the most part works out very well, really being carried by a constant barrage of fantasy from both the music and the visuals. Rather it be mixing stars into glitter to somehow create a blue liquid that is called cats, or just listening to a soundtrack that keeps an energetic beat to the entire experience, Bloop: Reloaded simply feels as if it is made to be inane.

This all combines together in Bloop: Reloaded aesthetically, creating a very pretty game with puzzle mechanics that seem to be more based around brute force over actual solutions. While the brute force method is interesting to have in a game, it often times feels as if the game intentionally designed it as any solution often times involves some careful timing and slowly grabbing and moving liquid to the right location to continue the puzzle.

While Bloop: Reloaded is visually appealing, the puzzles become less enjoyable to solve and more tedious as it drags on. Instead of focusing on drawing lines to move liquid, it starts to count more on the ability to grab and float the liquid or another new mechanic that was just thrown in, turning each puzzle into a slow slog to complete each section. It keeps itself extremely varied, but the end of the game puzzles can take 35-40 minutes after you already figured out a solution that seems to overstay its welcome.

Bloop: Reloaded is not a very complicated puzzle game, with the concept being that you can find a solution by beating your head onto a wall until it works instead of having to figure out what they wanted you to do. It fails in some respects, becoming tedious on certain levels, but succeeds in always making it feel as if you just have to try a little bit harder you will succeed. It is truly sold on Bloop: Reloaded music and visual design that makes it hard not to consider for anyone who happens to like puzzle games.

Bloop: Reloaded was obtained from the Kiss LTD and reviewed on Steam