Chapter Text
In a city gray and dull…
(camera pans over white-gray cartoon buildings, lifeless trees, and ink-filled ponds)
With foes pressing in on every side…
(cut to a line of menacing-looking black starfish creatures, then sweep across to a turret with its sight directly on the camera)
With the people lacking color or hope…
(show Inkies driving people along in chain gangs to work in the factories)
One hero…
(sweep to a red de Blob, with grim expression)
...will save them all.
(Color explodes onto the camera as Blob hops from building to building, navigating puzzles, smashing Inkies, and setting the people free. The Inkies get bigger and meaner, but Blob presses on, eventually coming face to face with an Inky mad scientist looming on a giant screen...but he simply jumps into the camera, and the trailer slams to a black background with “DE BLOB 3” painted in splashy rainbow font with white highlighting.)
Hey, maybe you’ll give this game a shot. The trailer was a little silly, sure--a dramatic tone over a cutesy, cartoony background--but it was silly in an intriguing way. The main character looked *awesome*, and the platforming should provide some challenge. Plus, the bright colors, vivid music and cartoon setting suggest a fun factor. It’s apparently a sequel to two other de Blob games, so you go to YouTube and look up footage of those; the second one especially looks great, and the trailer of the third showed off yet more cool stuff. So you order it, and when it arrives from Amazon Prime, you pop it into your Xbox and wait. The game loads, but instead of a menu screen you go right into the action…
The camera sweeps up the ocean toward a beach. On the beach, many round, colorful creatures are celebrating, all coalescing around a much larger colored BLOB creature. He makes a couple of dramatic bows, waving at partygoers holding up signs: some with a rainbow of colors, some with crossed-out black one-eyed starfish creatures. Eventually, four creatures--a short blue boy with roller skates, a tall green girl with a paintbrush, a chubby orange man with a red headband, and an older brown fellow with a monocle and hoverchair--plus a flying pink robot come to hand him a cake with a single candle on it. Just as Blob is about to blow the candle out, PINKY the robot’s belly screen starts beeping: on the other side of the beach, the color has been sucked out of the buildings, and tiny white robots are moving on to more buildings! Blob holds up a picture with an inquisitive look: a black starfish creature with one eye, a gray commissar cap, and military medals. But Pinky shakes her head, showing him floating around in a black hole. The other side of the island returns to view, and Pinky’s screen scrolls up, eventually revealing a mad scientist: black starfish body, single eye, white lab coat with a bar code label, black hair with lightbulb helmet, and maniacal laugh. DR. VON BLOT pours a test tube into a beaker, and takes off in the ensuing smoke. The camera cuts back to Blob with Pinky and the four other critters with grim expressions, and Blob jumps off, determined to stop von Blot.