I Played A Game That Turns Tetris Into Doom, And It’s For Babies

I’ve given talks to indie devs before about how to get their games noticed by press. There are a lot of (I hope) good tips I’ve offered, like “include GIFs in the email” and “include basic information like platform availability and the release date.” But ahead of PAX West, I received an invitation to demo a game that included maybe the most compelling pitch I’ve seen in an email in years.

It was the game’s title. The game was called Blocks for Babies. I needed no further information. I was a baby once, after all. I was in.

I’m so, so happy I took this weird chance on a game based on its goofy title alone, because Blocks for Babies was exactly the specific flavor of stupid fun I wanted from it. It stars a…baby, who wants me to help it clean up blocks. So far, simple. You clean them up by playing, essentially, Tetris. Still very easy to understand. For babies!

But some blocks are a weird, menacing red color, and do not clear out when you make a line. They just sit there as the rest of the blocks around them disappear. That’s going to be a problem eventually. How do I get rid of those blocks?

Well, in Blocks for Babies, you clear them by swapping into a first-person shooter mode that’s clearly reminiscent of Doom. The blocks come to life as angry, bloodthirsty, cubic monsters and start attacking you. You get a gun, and you shoot them until they explode, and then they’re gone for good.

Easy! For babies!

Blocks for Babies is also a roguelike. At the end of each round, you choose a perk or buff to carry forward, things like making certain blocks clear automatically when certain conditions are met or (I like this one) setting certain blocks on fire. But also, with most of these perks, the game speeds up a bit. Gets a little harder. New enemies appear. There’s a boss at the end, and beating him gives me a brand new gun to use in the next round. Except my demo is over, and the baby I am watching keeps following me around this damn house for some reason. Creepily.

I like this. I like the messy contrasts of the art style, the ways it mixes 2D and 3D and I like (hate!) the weird way the titular baby moves. I think the FPS bits do a good job of evoking Doom, or at least what would happen if they did a Doom x Tetris crossover. When the blocks’ angry Doom faces explode, they do a nice blasty boom, as if the blocks had guts that are flying everywhere. There are often many blocks at once, but you can modulate that by making decisions about how many blocks you try to fight at once when you go into the 3D mode. More blocks is harder to deal with, but there’s also the potential to clear more of the board.

© Bunksoft Interactive

The roguelike power-up choices offered some interesting decisions I wasn’t used to making about…Tetris. Heck, while I’m sure one exists out there, I haven’t played a roguelike Tetris game before. That alone is intriguing enough a concept to get me for a few rounds. And it helps too that the writing is genuinely pretty funny—a lot of games try to crack wise ones, but Blocks for Babies plays in opposites in a way that tickles the shitposter part of my brain. I guess that’s why I showed up to the appointment based on the title alone! I am the audience.

Even so, when I left the demo, I came away having had a good time, but unsure how much I wanted to keep playing beyond that short introduction. The joke, such as it was, had been played out, and I didn’t know if I had a lot of juice in me to keep playing Tetris and Doom intermittently.

But then I watched the trailer, which is both very funny, and also gives a good overview of the many, many other kinds of blocks and powers and complications that Blocks for Babies promises to throw at you. It also nods to the whole thing actually being somewhat of a horror game, maybe, which intrigues me. Knowing all that, I kind of want to try again and watch how blocks and babies evolve when exposed to whatever mutant energy this game is giving off.

Anyway, let it be known that I like Blocks for Babies, but I hate this child:

© Bunksoft Interactive