Blek

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Blek is a Puzzle game released on mobile devices in 2013 and ported to Wii U in 2015. This game has players using the Wii U gamepad’s touchscreen to draw a pattern, which will then repeat infinitely, with players aiming for the goal of making the line they draw cross through all colored dots on the screen without passing through any black dots.

Blek’s presentation is wonderfully minimalist, with a white background and flat-colored circles for the gameplay, with the only irregular object being the line you draw, which appears as a squiggly, wriggling line as it moves around the screen. There’s no music during gameplay, and only a soft synthesized tone transitioning players from one level to the next. One little quirk of personality is added to the game’s sound though – when your line hits a black dot, your failure is signaled by the game making a vaguely vocal squishy suckling noise that’s hard to describe. Whatever it is, this and the squiggly line both combine to lend this game a hint of personality where it would otherwise be a fairly sterile experience.

The gameplay here is fairly unique, and it’s interesting to see your actions repeated, including every pause and every moment when you draw more quickly or slowly. There’s definitely a fun Puzzle element here too, as you try to figure out how to get to all the colored dots without hitting a black one. However, this Puzzle element can make for a steep difficulty curve, with puzzles in the game quickly becoming so elaborate that it’s difficult to see how to solve them.

Another element that adds to this issue is the imprecise nature of your drawing. The game doesn’t provide any sort of graph paper-style gridlines in the background to help guide you, nor any way to ensure that the lines you draw are straight, so you’ll often have to eyeball things and just keep trying until your line is close enough to what you’re trying to make. Players a with less-steady drawing hand are at a disadvantage here.

Still, while the game’s difficulty makes it something that not everyone will appreciate, the core gameplay here is good and the aesthetic is fantastic. Players looking to add a unique, challenging Puzzle game to their Wii U library would do well to add this game to their collection.

tl;dr – Blek is a Puzzle game where players draw a line on the touchscreen, with that line repeating infinitely, and players are tasked with using this to draw through all colored dots on screen while avoiding black dots. The game design and clean-looking aesthetic in this game are fantastic, but the learning curve can be a bit steep, and the game is particularly unforgiving against those who can’t judge distances by eye or draw straight. However, if you’re looking for a stylish, unique, and difficult Puzzle game, this one is well worth adding to your Wii U library.

Grade: B-

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