Bluppo

Bluppo is one of those games that tumbles out of nineties computer archives and you ask yourself: what the hell is this? No publisher website, no reviews, no context. Just colorful bubbles on a black background and a feeling that this was once something for someone.

It's a simple match-clearing game — you shoot colored balls at fields of same-colored bubbles and try to get rid of them. A typical puzzle with the kind of mechanics you'd buy back then for three hundred crowns as part of a ten-in-one pack. The goal is traditional: clear the field, collect points, move to the next level. Basic, nothing fun lurking in the manual.

The controls are primitive like all games from that era — keyboard or mouse, movement, shooting, nothing complicated. But that's not its problem. The problem is that there's not a shred of something that would make you want to play it — the game lacks wit, sound, visuals, any of those hooks that would tell you why you should be looking at this exact spot on the screen. It's functional, lightweight, colorless. Like an interface to emotions that never showed up.

Bluppo is named and it exists. That's actually all you get from it. These aren't bad games — they're neutral games you'd play when you subscribed to a magazine with a CD and this was one of thirty titles tucked in a corner of the disk. They didn't offend, but they didn't delight either. They were just there.

Today you can play it if you've got a busier daily schedule and want something where you won't be rattled by nerves. It's not a game you'll come back to, but in the browser it cycles in place of papers on your desk. It's a venture without a plot — in a way, it's restful.