Bluey is a humble little cartoon that has, deservedly, blown up to become one of the biggest kids TV shows on the planet. Its ability to entertain both children and adults alike, along with that immense popularity, means it’s the perfect opportunity for a video game to really do the show justice.
Tragically, the new Bluey game is anything but. It's bad. It's really bad. And it's somehow bad for multiple reasons.
Firstly, the game itself! This episode of Bluey is called: shovelware. Bluey: The Videogame (yes, it's officially called videogame, not video game, another crime!) is a slapdash cashgrab that does the bare minimum. It's patronising for all but the youngest kid playing it, and it's excruciating for any adult picking up a controller. It's also technically jarring, with different parts of characters’ bodies displaying at different resolutions, lines of dialogue varying wildly in audio quality between sentences and animations that cut themselves short before they're done (sometimes taking accompanying voice work with them).
The game is boring to play, has almost none of the magic of the TV show--which is often at its best in moments of high excitement or quiet reflection, of which this game has neither--and just generally feels like a lost opportunity given the gulf in difference between the quality of the game and the show.
Not that I want to review the game in full here; the good Patrick Klepek has already done that, so please go read his more comprehensive rundown if you'd like to find out about the many ways this game sucks (and yet can still be enjoyed by children, who do not know better, and thus cannot be trusted to review video games).
What I'd like to talk more about, though, is the immense disappointment felt locally that the Bluey video game was not developed in Australia. It was instead developed by a small Spanish studio, Artax Games:
And published by Outright Games, a British company specialising in churning out low quality, high volume licensed content:
This suuuuuucks. Bluey is famous not just for its charm and wit and smart writing and wonderfully natural voice acting, but because it's one of the most Australian things to have graced a TV screen this decade. It's effortlessly Australian in ways that most other media, produced locally or otherwise, can't hold a candle to. From its language to its storylines, its flashbacks to its backgrounds, this is a world that can somehow be the most Australian thing you've ever seen, and yet not once feel the need to obnoxiously shout HEY, DID YOU KNOW THIS WAS SET IN AUSTRALIA. It is, in a rarity for Australian media, comfortable in its own skin.
While that might seem like an irrelevance when it comes to the show's global appeal, I think it's the single most important element. Anime didn't just become popular because of cool mechs (though that helped!), it's because cartoons developed from a Japanese perspective were different to what people elsewhere were used to, which made them fresh, and interesting, and gave them a unique place in the market.
Bluey has done this too. Yeah, it's funny, and sweet, but it's also giving the world stories told from a uniquely Australian perspective. And it's this, more than anything else, that's lost in the game.
Bluey: The Videogame feels like a tour through a wax museum exhibit of the show's universe. A collection of snapshots from someone's Australian holiday. Ah, there's the house! And there, if you stop and talk to them, are some of the characters. You can run through the house if you like, controlling a member of Bluey's family. But the game is so basic and empty, so superficial with its treatment, that none of this ever means anything.
It's not Artax's fault that they're not Australian, and it's not their fault the license for the game was handled internationally by the BBC, not the show's Australian creators (and to their credit, Artax and Outright did at least get access to the show's visual and audio legacies). This is, even more explicitly than we're used to with AAA adult titles, simply how the market works. A game with Bluey on the box will sell millions no matter what, and kids will lap it up no matter what because--I have two kids, I know this--small children don't know jack shit. They'll play anything. So the cheaper and quicker you can make the game, the better.
But a game can be made explicitly for kids and still be good, can still be enjoyed by adults as well. Just like the show. I know my own childhood was made a little better when Konami's TMNT and Simpsons games were legitimately good video games, even when I was playing with adults who had no idea what they were doing.
Look, if your kids are 4-6, this game is fine. They'll hear the theme song, they'll see the characters, they'll probably love it. But we don't need to set the bar that low! It bums me out that this isn't a better game, and it bums me out that an Australian studio especially--and there would have been no shortage of extremely talented developers lining up--wasn't given the chance here to craft something a little more imaginative, a little deeper and a little more faithful to the source material than the game we've ended up with here.
