The longer you play video games, the more you realise that you have no idea what you actually want. When I was younger I’d dream of infinite open worlds with limitless quests, crafting, multiplayer, and all the other features I could think of. Like Skyrim with guns, a neverending story, and set in space with thousands of planets. Not anymore. As I’ve gotten older, life has come at me fast, and now I love nothing better than a tight, punchy, linear game that I can pick up and put down in a reasonable amount of time. Enter Blanc.

Related: Season: A Letter To The Future Review - Golden Hour

Blanc has an eye-catching monochromatic art style, a clever gameplay hook, and you can complete it in one sitting. The thing is, as soon as I rolled credits on Casus Ludi's debut game, I couldn’t help but think, “I wish there was more here.”

Blanc sees you control two characters with one controller, à la Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. One analogue stick and the shoulder buttons control a pristine white fawn, and the other side of the controller moves a vantablack wolf cub. A co-op playthrough with one play the wolf and the other the fawn is also available. The rest of the world keeps up this style with the snowswept environments the two work together to get through. These environments are also entirely black and white. Despite this lack of colour, the game is perfectly readable. Hard black lines outline edges in the 3D space and, if we’re to be reductive and compare vastly different games, the cel-shaded 3D art style of Blanc often works better than that of recent Borderlands games. There’s a cleanness to the whole thing that means you can always tell what’s going on.

The whole game feels similarly sanitised. It’s one of the many smaller games being published by Gearbox Publishing at the moment, and it's also the least Gearbox-y game to ever come out of the studio behind Borderlands and Duke Nukem: Forever. It's the sort of cute indie darling you’d expect to see highlighted at a Wholesome Direct and in GIFs on Twitter, not getting trailers shared by the folks who gave us the Butt-stallion.

Blanc - Wolf cub looking at deer fawn in the snow

Throughout the game, you expect things to swerve into predictable heartbreak, I mean, you are the children of a predator and prey walking lost in their parents' tracks. However, the game never makes a cheap play for tears. Thank god, because let me tell you as someone that played all of It Takes Two with a friend, there is no gaming experience more tumultuous than watching an emotionally distressing cutscene while on a Discord call with your mate.

Blanc knows it’s not here to make you cry, it's here to make you go “awwww look at the cute lil animals!”. A large part of that is accomplished by the game's great (read: adorable) sound design. The yapping of your cub, and the bleating of the fawn are the most obvious things that melt your heart, but the soft crackling of crisp snow and the light touch of piano strings for a soundtrack tie the whole thing together.

That brings me to the game's big flaw: there just isn’t much to it. Not in a ”this game isn’t worth the cost” sort of way, I actually think having a short experience I could use to get a friend into video games is a valuable thing. No, there isn’t much there in the sense that the puzzles only grow somewhat engaging in the final chapter or two. Most of them are very straightforward for the first half of the game and don’t require much coordination. In fact, the game is only at its most challenging if you are playing alone, and even then only because it’s easy to forget which thumb is which animal.

Blanc - Two wolf cubs and two deer fawns climbing pipes

Things get a little more interesting when other animals are introduced. While these moments are neat, most of them are pretty surface level, since it mainly just sees two other AI mimicking your actions in the background, or you just have to block gales of wind for some ducklings. The final section of the game does a good job of shaking things up and separating the two main animals a bit more, but it would have been nice if there were more of these more engaging puzzles. Instead, the majority of the game is taken up by linear levels where you know exactly which character has to do what instantly. Then it’s simply a matter of “you go first, then I go.”

Blanc is nice. It’s not revolutionary, both as a single-player experience and a co-op puzzle game. However, it’s pretty and simple, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s the sort of game that serves a purpose. It’s a pleasant way to spend a night in with someone else.

blanc_review_card

Next: NeverAwake Review - Disturbingly Decent