We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
The title is a little mysterious. What is a Klex, and why is it named Blob? Or is Blobbing something that one does to a Klex?
As it turns out, Klex is a kittycat! A black cat, that looks, a bit, like a black blob that moves around. Klex is the name, Blob is what it is. I can ignore the order of the nouns in the title for cuteness factor.
Cat games are springing up in greater numbers. All spiritual descendants of their great ancestor Neko, more lately you play as the cat. Maybe Stray was what kicked them off, but more recently there was the wonderful Little Kitty, Big City. (I interviewed its creators over on Game Developer!)
Blog the Klex is a demo for another cat game, currently being worked on by Sigma Unit. It’s free at itch.io. It’s being worked on by a much smaller team, and there isn’t a lot to do in the demo, but it shows a terrific sense of whimsy. Klex is adorable, and plays differently from the unnamed kitty in LKBC. LKBC is quite a vertical game, with a lot of climbing around, but Klex mostly runs on the ground with some jumping.
Klex’s animation is “procedural,” meaning in this case that the game figures out where their front paws go, and the rest of the cat follows from that. As Klex runs, there’s a jingling, like of a jingle ball rolling along, that perfectly follows their foorsteps. It’s a case where the sum is greater than the parts: the cat’s head, eyes huge, staying perfectly level, while their paws move in a flurry beneath them, jingling away. It’s very cute. Then you hold the Dash button down, and it gets cuter. You have to experience it to understand. You should. Also, Klex is more apt to squeeze themselves into narrow spaces than the cat in KLBC, and has a very cat-like ability to walk on narrow ledges. They also have an uncat-like ability to turn themself into a bouncy ball. Maybe Klex is part Samus.
The game itself, as it currently is, is brief, a sequence of areas where it’s left to you to figure out how to progress. Like LKBC there is nothing that can harm the cat. The worst that can happen is you fall off of a roof, and the game voids you out and puts you back on the rooftop. (I don’t know why you can even fall off; there’s a lot of invisible walls around to keep you on track. Maybe they have later plans for those street areas.)
Most of it is straightforward, but there are a couple of places where you might get stuck, until you realize you can grab some moving objects by holding down the Interact button. Once you know that you shouldn’t have much trouble. You’ll know the demo is over because you’ll get a screen of credits.
Please give Blob the Klex a try! And enjoy a few screenshots:
Blob the Klex Demo (itch.io, $0)
