Blanc (2023)

Hm. I'm on the fence about this. It's a cute little adventure, more a walking sim than anything else. The graphics are gorgeous, I love the style they went for. The "puzzles" mostly consist of "push this log to make a path" or "block the wind to get the ducklings across". Not a challenge at all. You just walk, jump and push/pull objects to make your way through the levels. I do enjoy games like this every once in a while. Just a relaxing evening with my partner, enjoying a chill game. However, we were fully through after a little more than 1 1/2 hours (including getting stuck for a few minutes at two points during the game) and it has NO replay value. Usually, I'm a very slow player because I look at and try out everything to not miss anything. Plus, the whole experience just wasn't very polished. The characters sometimes got stuck on things or struggled making a jump because the prompts didn't show up properly. Especially the part of the game where you have to guide NPC animals is very finicky as they don't always follow instructions well. And when I saw they re-used one of the story ideas/cutscenes (I don't wanna spoil anything) in this short of a game, I'm not sure I feel good about having paid 8€ for it and that's already with 50% off.

Side Note: BEWARE! I haven't included this in my rating of the game but I almost immediately refunded it the second it installed. It suddenly installed an Epic Online Launcher without even asking. I do NOT want Epic on my pc and I do NOT want to support them for various reasons. It does not mention this anywhere on the Steam page, I read it before buying the game and re-checked three times after starting the game because I thought I might have just missed it. However, I decided to still try the game after I uninstalled Epic and found out the game still runs fine without. Why did it have to install Epic unprompted then? I have no clue. Shady.

Blanc is a game where you play as a fawn and a wolf cub working together to survive a brutal winter and find their respective families. It is extremely light on plot (they face some adversities but what I described in the previous sentence is it) and gameplay (each character has a control stick, a jump button, and an action button). It is so light on gameplay that my wife AND two of my children got bored playing with me, and I ended up playing by myself. You may be asking why one would play a game this interactively sparse. Well first off, it looks like this:

Every scene has this wonderful blank-and-white/Inktober style. While it features some of the visual jank that accompanies most smaller releases, it does look consistently artistically pleasant. While my wife and kids did not want to play this game with me, they did like watching me play. The pleasing visuals, the (mostly) calming music, and the occasional mammalian howl create an atmosphere that just draws you in.

Which brings me to my second point- animals rock. If you have no love for animals just being naturally cool, you probably won't vibe with this game as just being with animals is a big part of the experience. Blanc delicately walks the line between humanizing their animals and keeping the animals wild. I was able to both relate to and be in awe of the deer and wolf.

Finally, I think this game is best played solo. Maybe if you have a proficient gaming pal who is patient and loves animals (and you yourself are a proficient gaming pal who is patient and loves animals) you could have a fun time. But I found my time playing with others to be overly simple. Even when I played by myself, I wouldn't describe this game as hard. Heck, there are no fail states that I experienced! However, the act of having six inputs that you operate (often simultaneously) adds enough complexity to make the game enjoyable to me- a guy who smashed buttons to win fighting games as a child.

This game is really, really, really REALLY pretty.

It's a shame that it has shallow gameplay, bad level design, boring story and a lot of bugs.

You can read my review in spanish here.

But IT IS REALLY PRETTY. Enough to give it a good score (you can enjoy a game just because its aesthetics). It is also extremely short. A couple of hours.