When you think back to the moment you tried VR for the first time, chances are, you were shown something that was impressive at the time, but not particularly spectacular in hindsight. Think the 360° video your slightly-techy uncle showed you in one of those cheap smartphone VR kits, or an early proof-of-concept you played on your Oculus Rift DK1. You might’ve been excited or fascinated by it at the time, but is it really something you’d go back to all these years later?
BLARP! is one such early VR experience that I think is well worth a revisit. Or if you’re like me, maybe you’ve never even played it before.
BLARP! is an arcade physics puzzle game made by artist and game developer Isaac Cohen, also known as Cabbibo. Cabbibo had previously created the interactive web-based experience Enough, which crushingly no longer appears to work correctly in modern browsers. If you can watch it on YouTube or something, I highly recommend you do. It’s quite touching.
Back to BLARP, the game came out on April 4, 2016 to demonstrate the features of the HTC Vive, which shipped to customers that same month. The Vive was the first VR headset to come with motion controllers, so this era was prime time for developers to experiment and figure out how they could put these controllers to use. Yet despite this, BLARP! feels very refined in its simplicity.
The Gameplay
Taking place almost entirely in a claustrophobic cube, the game is centered around the physics of the Blarp, a ball that gravitates towards your right controller when you press the trigger, and keeps its momentum for a bit after you release the trigger. You have to use this gravitational pull to get the ball moving into the goal, which is a bigger, more colorful ball with a number on it. You can press and release to swing your Blarp around, or bounce it off of the walls of the cube. But if your Blarp touches either of your hands, your game is over, or as the game’s tutorial calls it, you get “BLARP’D”. And speaking of hands, your left controller can be used to shield yourself from a Blarp by pressing the trigger. This can be particularly useful if you need to stop a Blarp’s momentum in place. When you reach the end of one level, the game adds in another Blarp, and does this continuously as you advance to each level, making the challenge of reaching the goal while preventing the Blarps from touching your hands all the more difficult. It’s a simple but addictive gameplay loop, one that reminds me of early score-based arcade games. Where Flappy Bird brought that simple arcade spirit to mobile, BLARP! brings it to VR.
The Experience
BLARP‘s psychedelic colors and visual effects are simply entrancing, there’s no other way to put it. When a Blarp collides with a wall, the wall ripples like it’s made of jelly. As your Blarps move, they draw colorful tails in their paths, like comets shooting across the night sky. And the music, full of synthesized vocalizations, is the perfect backdrop for watching your Blarps soar around the arena.
The Performance (on Frame)
I played BLARP! standalone on my Steam Frame in Performance mode, at 1728 x 1728 per eye in 72 Hz. Being a game this old, it is an OpenVR game made for Windows, and as such, runs under FEX and Proton. SteamVR’s performance indicator didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t putting out good frametimes, but I found it perfectly playable. It feels quite smooth most of the time. That might change when you get a large number of Blarps on your screen, but even when that happened, I found it playable enough. The controls worked out of the box, and did not need any tinkering from me.
The Verdict
BLARP! really is the kind of idea that only could’ve been made in the era that it was. These days, it feels like many VR games try too hard to conform to the standards of a regular video game. But when BLARP! was made, developers were encouraged to take risks and experiment in this new frontier. Nobody had really done much with motion controllers in VR before the Vive, so it’s only natural that many fresh ideas would emerge from there. And BLARP! perfectly marries its creative use of motion with an addictive score-based gameplay and visuals that are pure eye candy.
BLARP! is available on Steam for US$2.99. I highly recommend you check it out.
