Have You Played... Super Splatters?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

I first played Super Splatters [official site] under a different name: Confetti Carnival. It fell into my lap just as the indie game renaissance was happening and just as Peggle was becoming a sensation, and it seemed like this might be the next big thing.

The levels are set on a single screen covered in gooey blobs. You control the blobs, launching them one by one in any direction such that they slide along surfaces, dodge obstacles, combine into larger blobs, and ultimately hit a surface with enough force such that they burst into liquid. You want to burst them in the right place so that their juice falls on small piles of bombs, causing them to explode. Clear all the bombs to win the level.

The original demo build I played was great, like a Peggle with World of Goo's charming blobs instead of balls, and just as much triumphalism - explosions, cheering, and as the name suggests, lots of confetti.

Then Microsoft came along. Like so many indie games, Confetti Carnival jumped at the XBox 360, became a platform exclusive, and then disappeared into development for years. I don't know the story of exactly what went happened, but when it finally re-emerged it was called The Splatters and seemed to go largely unnoticed. The developers eventually got money from Indie Fund to port to PC as Super Splatters in 2013. I hope it was successful, because it deserves to be.