Blueberry

Genre: Platformer / Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Hidden Trap)

Blueberry, released in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch, is a Platformer with some Puzzle elements that has players following the story of a woman who goes by the nickname Blueberry. We start her story seeing her at an old age struggling to process the rejection of being uninvited from her granddaughter’s birthday party, and then proceed to explore her life from childhood through to the current day as she climbs a metaphorically-imbued tower and contends with her own depression and self-loathing.

As you may have gleaned, Blueberry is a very story-focused game, and the themes the story touches on hit on some areas that will be sensitive for some people, contending with parental neglect and alcoholism, suicide, the struggles facing immigrant families, and the oppressive nature of negative thought patterns plaguing those who suffer from depression.

The presentation here is mostly good, with abstract 2D visuals composed using a lot of simple clean shapes, backed by a fittingly somber synthesized soundtrack. I do think the visuals can get a bit repetitive in places, but overall this game has a striking style that works well when the focus is on the characters and emotions this game presents.

When it comes to the gameplay, Blueberry has players platforming up a large tower, periodically interspersed with doorways that lead to moments in Blueberry’s life, which usually have some task or puzzle to resolve, or a conversation to work through. Upon completing these, players are rewarded with puzzle pieces that they slot into a Jigsaw-style puzzle to unlock the path upward.

While the story and the characters are strong here, I cannot ignore the elephant in the room – Blueberry is a pretty buggy game. I will note that I made it a point to delay reviewing this game because it had clear issues at launch that I wanted to wait to see if they would be resolved in a post-launch patch. This game did indeed receive a patch that resolved many of its issues, but not all of them.

I still have this game crashing on me numerous times while playing it, and at times it seems to mess up in inexplicable ways, such as one time after I reloaded after a crash and it made me replay the sequence I just played, but now as an old woman instead of a teenager, without an explanation why, all while giving me new conversation choices but not letting me select any of them. Odd. Another time, I was tasked with slotting an object into the jigsaw puzzle, but the place for said object wasn’t in any piece I had placed down, and the game wouldn’t proceed until I had guessed at the object’s position. These sorts of odd problems frequently interrupted the flow of the game, and made it far more difficult to immerse myself into it.

I should note that I have been informed that the issues this game has are apparently tied to an early sequence involving a child version of the protagonist placing fish in a diorama, and that placing fewer objects in the diorama can prevent some or all of these errors. As I have played through a significant portion of the game twice now, I’ll say I’m not overly eager to dive in a third time to test this, but if you’re playing the game you may want to watch out for this section when it comes up and go easy on the in-game arts and crafts to save yourself headache later.

Unfortunately, even if it weren’t for the bugs and the crashes, Blueberry has other issues as well. It’s a Platformer where the platforming is mediocre at best, and it’s a Puzzle game where its puzzles aren’t at all puzzling or satisfying – I constantly felt less like I was playing a game and more like I was progressing through tasks, and the tower I was constantly climbing throughout the game frequently felt like pointless padding to stretch out the playtime between the story moments that are the heart of this game.

It’s a real shame too, because you can absolutely see that a lot of love was put into Blueberry, and if the platforming was better, or removed entirely, and if the puzzles were better, or removed entirely, and if the bugs and crashes weren’t present, what you’d be left with is a touching story about a woman coming to terms with how her childhood trauma has trained her to view her current struggles through a negative lens. Instead, you get moments of sad poignancy interspersed with tedium or frustration. And as much as I feel this game’s better qualities deserve to be appreciated, I can’t recommend the game when you have to slog through its issues to get to those moments.

tl;dr – Blueberry is a Platformer with Puzzle game elements that has players exploring the life of Blueberry, a woman struggling with depression and looking back on her life to get a better context for her struggles in the current day. The story and characters here are lovely, but they’re dragged down by a buggy, crashing game that’s stretched thin with mediocre platforming and lackluster “puzzles”. There are some genuinely good moments in this game, but I cannot recommend it when you have to slog through so much tedium and frustration to get to those moments.

Grade: C-

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