Bulb Boy Video Game Review | Nintendo Switch [VIDEO]
Bulb Boy is Ren & Stimpy meets The Binding of Isaac by way of point-and-click minimalism.
Have you played Bulb Boy? If so, what are your thoughts?
Transcript(ish)
It’s time for a post-game smoke, where I give a few thoughts on a game as soon as possible after playing it. As is the nature of this type of video, it’s short, quickly thrown together, and certainly rides emotional high or low of whatever game I just finished. I trade in-depth analysis for visceral reaction. Both are important, but I only offer one here. If you are new to the channel, I offer plenty of longer, more thought-out videos, so please stay and poke around a bit.
The credits have rolled on Bulb Boy…well, the “credits have rolled part” is not entirely true, but more on that later.
First, let’s acknowledge something we all know. Light bulbs are fragile, and until playing the game Bulb Boy, I assumed that fragility was limited to the physical. But it turns out, via the mind of, I assume demented game developers, light bulbs can be emotionally fragile too, enough so to carry the narrative and art direction of an entire video game. And I use the term “video game” loosely, as Bulb Boy is a game that’s satisfied with tepidly accommodating video game tropes enough to just technically count as a game. It’s point-and-click simplicity. What Bulb Boy aims to do more than satisfy a critical definition of video game is to be as gross as possible while not distracting from its emotional effectiveness.
Bulb Boy is Ren & Stimpy meets The Binding of Isaac by way of point-and-click minimalism. What do I mean by that? Well, think of Ren & Stimpy. Now think of The Binding of Isaac. Those first images you conjured, perhaps Ren’s diseased teeth or Isaac fighting sentient feces. That’s what I mean.
The level design notes during the development of this game likely consisted of “add more poop to” and “where’s the vomit?” Which I, as a fan of easy games that push experience over mechanics, am okay with. More mature people may find this single, continuously struck chord less fulfilling.
You play as the titular Bulb Boy on a mission to, I think, save his flying dog pet and aging grandfather from, something. I don’t even know why the grandfather needs saving. He’s probably had a pretty good life. Given the grandfather’s still luminous cranium, I’m guessing he’s packing quite a large filament, if you know what I mean, meaning he’s satisfied plenty of ladies looking for light in their lives…I lost where I was going for that…I can’t remember Watt I was talking about…lumens.
Back to my comment about the credits not having rolled, I played this game on the Nintendo Switch, and I found that during the final boss fight the responsiveness of the controls, or perhaps the default movement speed, or perhaps something else entirely prevented me from completing the game. It was impossible to escape the boss’s inhale move. I looked online for solutions, but found nobody else with the same issue. Therefore, I have to logically blame the game rather than any inadequacies that I may have. I have no inadequacies. Especially in the filament department, if you know what I mean…and if you do, tell me in the comments below, because I do not.
Perhaps the most haunting aspect of this game isn’t the poop, the snot, the vomit, or any of the other ever-present viscera dripping from the game’s rafters. The most haunting aspect may be that I now associate the sound of a bursting light bulb with the sound of a popping skull. (sound). And to harken back to the fragility comments earlier, I also must now consider the delicate thinness of a human skull. It’s honestly disturbing the first time you experience a Bulb Boy death. A hearty “great job” to the developers for turning such an innocuous sound into something .
Tell me in the comments if you’ve played Bulb Boy. What did you think of it? And please, if you also experience the impossible final boss on the Switch, tell me. I don’t want to be crazy.
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Thank you for watching.
Mentioned
http://www.bulbware.com/ (Bulb Boy developers)
The following are YouTube videos licensed under CC BY 3.0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7Jk59SoWSs
Music Credits
Video Dungeon Crawl Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
