Blippo+

Genre: FMV Game / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Well, it looks like that time of year again where I review a game that fills me with an overwhelming sense of “what the heck even is this?”. Last year, the game in question was A Time Traveller’s Guide To Past Delicacies, and now it is Blippo+, originally released in 2025 on the Playdate handheld game system, and then ported later that same year to PC and Nintendo Switch.

Blippo+ is a FMV game, though “game” is overselling the interaction here, as there’s little to do here but navigate menus and passively watch the content that you’ve selected. The premise here is that you’ve somehow come into possession of a PeeDee, a device carrying the Blippo television service that lets you scan through numerous television channels, each playing a loop of 4 or 5 1-minute television programs, all playing out in real time.

These television programs run the gamut of the bizarre, but are all stylized to imitate the look and style of late-1980s/early-1990s television, with bright oversaturated colors, low-resolution fuzzy video footage, frequent screen static, laughably silly outfits and hairstyles, and absurdly wooden and cheesy acting, with most of this content featuring live-action FMV.

You have talk shows with cringe-inducing forced laughter from both host and guest, Bill Nye/Beakman’s World-style kid-focused science shows, a Dungeons and Dragons-esque-themed trivia show, cooking shows featuring bizarre dishes made from fictional ingredients, movie previews of a blatantly pandering exploitation film with heavy overuse of green screen, a soap opera where every character is a clone, simple highly-pixelated low-quality digital animation, stop-motion animation, color-shifted video of beaches cross-fading into each other, and imitations of a sort of write-in message board, just to name a few.

The thing is, both the PeeDee and Blippo are from a faraway planet that has somehow sent these cultural transmissions to Earth through a mysterious anomaly that the folks on Blippo increasingly take to calling The Bend, with news of your passive consumption of their television programming increasingly fascinating and exciting the folks you’re watching.

The overall experience here seems much like channel-surfing using Rick and Morty’s interdimensional TV remote, or Futurama’s Fry flicking through that show’s wacky future TV programs without having any context for what he’s seeing… except in this case, everything is styled like shows from our Earth 35 years ago but if an alien tried to reproduce something like them without fully understanding what they were.

As you watch, you’ll occasionally be sent new “packets” containing new episodes for the shows you’ve seen, as well as altogether new channels and shows, which helps to evolve the stories of the individual shows as well as the overarching story of how everyone is reacting to far-out aliens watching their TV broadcasts.

However, don’t go into Blippo+ expecting a strong narrative, as the minute-long episodes of each show don’t really give much opportunity to build character arcs or anything like that. This is more about establishing a vibe created by the collective consumption of all of this absurdity.

So, is it good? Is it bad? This is one of those times where I don’t think an actual grade really works, because this is so strange, so deliberately incoherent, so unlike anything else that whether you like it is really going to depend on your own personal tastes, and especially how much you enjoy cheesy camp, faux retro nostalgia, post-modernist art, and art that is deliberately stylistically bad and ugly.

As criticisms go, the only one that I feel I can really highlight as an actual criticism rather than just a personal preference is my frustration that this game isn’t clear about how you unlock new “packets” that allow you to see new content, and missing a show means you’ll have to wait another 4-5 minutes for it to loop around again.

However, overall, Blippo+ is… well, it’s just really, really strange. And that’s the sort of thing that some people will love and some people will absolutely hate. However, to give credit where it’s due, I think that Blippo+’s creators have absolutely succeeded in delivering what they intended, an experience like no other. If that piques your interest, you should give this a look.

tl;dr – Blippo+ is a FMV “game” that has players flicking through channels of an alien television service offering a bizarre reproduction of late-1980s/early 1990s-style TV. It’s weird, cheesy, campy, not very interactive, and extremely niche in a way that some people will love and others will hate. If you crave something out of the norm, this is very, very much out of the norm. But whether you like it will really be a matter of personal taste.

Grade: ?

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