Whenever I load up a new digital novel I’ll admit I always feel a minor sense of dread, since so many of them tend to butt up against the question of whether they can really be considered games. Thankfully there are those that have proven they in fact should be, but there are also many that make no meaningful strides to be more than digital clip-art slapped onto endless walls of text, and providing for very limited player agency. When trying to come up with some basis of comparison for Blippo+, that’s the closest genre I could think of for comparison, as it will absolutely leave you wondering what you just experienced, not so much played.

For anyone from roughly my generation of vintage gamers, this will likely feel like you’ve gone into a time warp to your childhood, and the very early days of basic cable. The general idea is that you’re observing transmissions from another world, and simply being a voyeur into their culture and entertainment. For the generations of gamers who have become accustomed to on-demand entertainment, the activity of channel surfing through real-time programming, or consulting the TV listings to see what’s on, will likely be completely mind-boggling. But for people like me, there’s absolutely some nostalgia to tap as you surf around and see what goodies they’ve packed into this experience, even throwing in a scrambled “adult” channel for good measure.

I wouldn’t say it is devoid of a storyline, as if you observe enough shows you’ll absolutely pick up some common threads in stray comments, and digging into the BBS-like Femtofax channel options you can see other bits and pieces of an overall narrative. That said, trying to find the point to it all isn’t really necessary, as you can simply enjoy the mechanics of being an old-school couch potato, home from school and bored as you flip through a collection of bizarre cooking shows, news, kids programming, and more. I will absolutely give the people behind this credit for going the extra mile by using actual equipment from that era to record this, and to the loads of actors who help to give it all an air of authenticity, partly through so much of it being pretty weird and sometimes outright bad. It’s a bizarre creation, to be sure, but it’s also a daring project that deserves some respect for its willingness to go all-in on an offbeat concept.