For the last few months we’ve been hard at work putting the finishing touches on our upcoming PSN platformer Tales from Space: About a Blob. I’m very excited to announce that the game’s release is now just weeks away! In North America, the game will be released as a PlayStation Plus exclusive on February 1st, with a general release to follow a week later on February 8th.
First, a quick recap for those of you who may have missed our previous PlayStation.Blog postings: Tales from Space: About a Blob is a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer about a race of alien Blobs that land on an Earth-like planet and start eating everything around them. The game features a retro-inspired art style, local co-op gameplay, a monster-movie theme, and a healthy dose of humor.
Collection is a big part of the game. As you make your way through the levels you must find and eat objects that are smaller than you, which causes you to grow. Little by little you get larger and larger, eventually becoming large enough to absorb cars, people, buildings, etc. Collectible points and hard-to-find “Blob friends” are also scattered about the levels. These are used to provide secondary achievement targets to players looking for an extra challenge.
The Blobs have a variety of abilities at their disposal. Basic abilities include jump, absorb, slam,
and “run” (if you can call what a Blob does when it moves fast “running”!). From the start of the game, player Blobs can also spit out objects they’ve already absorbed and then pull them back from a distance using a special “attract” ability. In co-op play you can use the spit/attract abilities to pass objects back and forth between players.
Over the course of the game, the Blobs are given a couple of additional powers. The first of
these, “Magnetic”, allows Blobs to pull toward and/or push away from metal objects. In-game, these objects are outlined with a purple glow. If a Blob uses its magnetic ability near a fixed metal object like a steel wall, it will be pulled toward or pushed away from the wall. Blobs can use this ability to hover in mid-air around certain areas. When used around loose metal objects, the magnetic ability causes these loose objects to fly away from or toward the player.
A second special Blob ability – introduced a bit later in the game – is the “Electric” power. This ability allows Blobs to pull electricity out of special machines (outlined in blue) and push it back into other machines. This can be used to manipulate objects in the environment: Turning moving platforms on and off, for example, or causing platforms to rotate. The electric ability is particularly useful in some of the puzzles found in the second half of the game.
The full game features a healthy amount of content. Each of the game’s seventeen levels contain special speed run and collection achievement targets. We have also included online leaderboards to track top speed run times for each level.
There will be a free trial version of the game from day one. If you decide to give it a try: Grab a friend if you can – co-op is really a lot of fun. I hope you guys have as much fun playing the game as we did making it!
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