It’s tough to pick a favorite of the broadcasts I’ve been receiving from Planet Blip. I’m partial to the rants delivered by Blinker, an artificial being who lives between channels and signs off with “All hail the new static!” I’m also into Quizzards, a combination quiz show/roleplaying game where contestants answer questions instead of rolling dice to find out how their fantasy alter egos perform, and Boredome, where real teens talk about the real issues of the day. (“No adults allowed!”)
Blippo+ is a game in the loosest sense of the word. Mostly what you do is scroll between channels to watch episodes of shows that are only a few minutes long. Some are animated, like Fetch, a perfect pastiche of surreal claymation like the Italian series The Red and the Blue, but mostly it’s live-action broadcasts from an alien planet. That alien planet just happens to resemble our world in the camp 1980s. If you remember Max Headroom, the Ceefax data-blast, or Zoo-era Top of the Pops you’ll find it oddly familiar. But if you don’t? Just think big shoulderpads and bigger hair.
A bend in spacetime has allowed broadcasts from Planet Blip into our world, and once you’ve watched a percentage of each day’s ever-cycling shows you unlock the next. One brief puzzle demanded I fiddle with dials to retune frequencies, but apart from that your only points of interaction are channel-surfing and trying to figure out what’s going on.
The people of Planet Blip are aware of the bend in spacetime, and have begun deliberately sending their TV shows through it to communicate with us. Eventually they send Bendonauts through to our world as well. At first the news and current affairs programs are the main source of updates on the larger story, but the discovery of alien life filters down through all levels of Blip’s society. What do the teens of the Boredome think about us?
Blippo+ is a fascinating experiment, but ultimately a failed one. The shows come in packettes that in the original version (which was designed for the Playdate handheld) were unlocked on a timed schedule. In the high-res PC version they’re unlocked by watching a hidden percentage of each packette’s shows. The problem is a lot of the shows are repetitive, and some of them just straight-up repeat.
The first time you see an episode of Bushwalker, a first-person walk through wilderness with videogamey hands and a voice whispering “bushwaaalkerrr” at the end, it’s funny. But then you watch slightly different versions of it over and over while waiting for each packette to unlock, knowing full well they will also contain another episode of Bushwalker, and of that one gratingly American breakfast show.
When you finally make it to the end, Blippo+ just stops. I didn’t need a resolution for the show where you watch the changing level of fizzy drink in a glass, and I guess Quizzards does climax with a final challenge, but unfortunately the overarching story goes nowhere.
The main thing I took away from Blippo+ was a reminder that in the olden times when we had remote controls made of dinosaur bones, watching scheduled TV was a chore and channel-surfing was an unfulfilling way to experience it—even when the shows were good.
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