Cartoony Free Retro FPS: Blobby Boys 3D
Trippy comic art
I may pretend I'm above nostalgia, being disinterested in the floods of retro platformers and RPGs, but in truth the wave of nostalgia simply misses what I semi-embarrassedly remember fondly from my formative years. Wonky shareware FPSs and drug dealing games were more up my skeezy alley (I was a well edgy teen, yeah?), supped from cover discs and passed around on copied floppies. Blobby Boys 3D [official site] combines those two.
Blobby Boys 3D is a free short FPS set in a colourful cartoon world with a mix of 2D sprites and 3D art, where you're out to sell drugs, make money, and kill the big boss. The FPSing is wonky and the drug-dealing window dressing, but it's charming and stylish.
There's a charming '90s crudeness to it all, both in tone and fidelity. It controls like ye olde fake-3D FPSs and doesn't even have mouselook so it's clumsy and takes getting used-to, but I was glad I did. The first level is a delightful little city block I enjoyed exploring. You wander around, finding money and drugs, and selling drugs to folks. That's all simple enough, unless you deal to a narc who'll call the cops on you.
The second level goes a bit trippy, with skull-faced citizens hiding in a booby-trapped maze. I didn't finish this level because gosh I do not miss mazes at all, but I think the game's still worth a play. I'll go back and force myself to finish that this evening and find what's next.
I have since learned it's based on a webcomic, but evidently one can enjoy the game without reading that.
Resist the temptation to force it into fullscreen with alt+enter: the game's hardcoded to run at 640x480 and the UI and weapons will get very wonky if you change it. That's a shame, as you get to see and appreciate the world a lot more when it's not crammed into a little box. Boo. If you don't mind getting your hands dirty in the Windows registry, you can at least make it run at 640x480 fullscreen (anyone who can be trusted not to muss up their PC in the registry should be able to figure out how to do that).
Blobby Boys 3D is a free download for Windows and Mac from Itch.