Back in the 1980’s I gave myself nightmares by staying up late to watch the remake of the horror film “The Blob” and as horrific as that film is it never occurred to me what the Blob must be feeling while it was on its rampage and after playing ROLLA I now have firsthand experience. ROLLA is the debut title from developer Tyrmä Games and you take control of a horrendous eldritch horror that has escaped confinement. There is little story to be had however each level cleverly represents a containment breach in the past and what you are witnessing is documented by the local news cameras or a security feed.
Depending on what decade the containment breach occurred affects how the level looks as you are watching through an eye in the sky news report, so the footage filmed in the 1970’s is noticeably grainier than footage caught in the 80s and so on and this is a fantastic touch. Gameplay is simple you start as a tiny blob, and you must consume everything and everyone to gain mass. The bigger you are the more you can envelope with your seething mass of flesh and tentacles so you can eventually absorb huge structures such as skyscrapers and the humans contained within.
They see me Rollin’ they hatin‘.
However, you must be careful as the faster you grow the bigger the military response, each time you take damage from the mobilised army and law enforcement response your mass decreases so the levels become a game of cat and mouse as you search for ever more biomass to consume to fuel your survival while you dodge enemy tanks, soldiers and airstrikes. Occasionally power-ups drop from the sky and if collected give temporary but helpful abilities to help you survive a bit longer.
Each level has a long list of challenges that you must complete before you can progress to the next containment event, these start of relatively easy such as consuming 60 humans or cause 1 million dollars in damage, these rapidly escalate and in the later areas some of the challenges are really tough which gives ROLLA a huge amount of replayability as you revisit old levels to try and destroy 100% of the town or find pesky radio towers to squash.
That’s a spicy meatball!
Controlling your blob is extremely simple you can give yourself a small boost of speed which is enough to gain momentum to smash through things and if things get bad you also have the ability to shoot out grasping tendrils to grab any annoying soldiers or fleeing civilians to absorb if only the people knew it’s not personal it’s just a battle of survival and you happen to be winning.
The pumping synth music that accompanies the action is awesome and it really gives the gameplay an 80’s horror/sci fi vibe and it almost drowns out the horrific screams of terror from your victims as you dissolve them on mass. The only complaint I have with ROLLA was that strangely there is no option to change the buttons with controllers, not really a huge problem but I would have preferred using the trigger buttons on my handheld device for the controls.
The game itself looks great, the graphics are simple but affective and as I mentioned the visual quality improves as you progress with missions throughout time which makes sense and is a nice touch as you are meant to be watching the action through a local news report, so as technology improves with the particular decade the mission takes part in it also reflects how the news report looks. However, there is an option to remove this if you wish. The levels themselves are also varied and interesting and also affect how you approach the game for example the desert level has less biomass to absorb so is tougher to survive, or the city level which has a huge amount for your blob to eat and therefore grow however has a bigger military response to your city destroying shenanigans.
Tis a remorseless eating machine!
ROLLA is a game I have had on my Steam Wishlist for a while now and it really did not disappoint; ROLLA is a simple concept but executed in such a great way. Who knew becoming a relentless Blob from who knows where could be so fun! The game is mindless and chaotic and like the Blob absorbs civilians, ROLLA absorbs time. If you want to try out life as a space horror you can find the game here.
