Blueberry
Some games are created to entertain us, but others are designed to place a mirror in front of our own souls, inviting us to a deep introspection. Blueberry is one of those rare, deeply emotional puzzle platformers that immediately tugs at your heartstrings. It invites us into the fragile mental state of Barbara, nicknamed Blueberry, as she navigates the winding road of her life.
Experiencing this story feels less like playing a game and more like turning the heavy pages of a personal diary. We watch her grow from a helpless child, witnessing her parents being drunk and the shattering heartbreak of their divorce, to a conflicted teenager. In those teen years, she faces the heavy, unfair choices that so many young people know too well, like deciding whether to buy a costume for a witch party or medicine for her mother instead, knowing she will face the cruel mockery of her classmates if she attends the party underdressed. All the while suffering through several episodes of her mom nagging at her about everything. As the years pass, she comes to face the exhausting reality of single motherhood, desperately fighting the silent ghost of generational trauma to avoid repeating her mother’s mistakes. Finally, in the quiet twilight of old age, she faces her lifelong traumas and finally learns to accept, forgive, and heal from her own demons.
Much like in Gris, the platforming here is very casual, without any frustrating elements. You will not find any punishing spikes or platforms that are too far away, and nothing requires precision jumps. There are a couple of timed sequences, but the timers are so generous that you might as well ignore the clock completely. Even if you do happen to fail, dying simply respawns you right at the same location, which is very forgiving for a platformer game.
Jumping from platform to platform leads Blueberry in a linear manner towards unlocking memory rooms that hold small puzzles or tough conversations with her family members. These rooms are the painful anchors of her past, marking the exact key points where her trauma and grief took root and then developed. As you revisit these moments, the game presents you with dialogue options that range from angry outbursts to peaceful responses, letting you decide which side of her emotional struggle to reenact. These choices hit incredibly hard, forcing you to really weigh in on Blueberry’s emotional maturity.
Platforming thus becomes the representation of something much more profound, as it is a literal and metaphorical ascension of life’s staircase. The simple puzzles act as small knots we must untangle in our minds before we can move forward, mirroring how we handle real-life grief, where the hardest steps are never physical but emotional.
From a completionist perspective, there are a few less polished aspects. Many choices in the game are tied to mutually exclusive achievements, and since there is no manual save system or post-game chapter selection, you will need to play through the entire story at least twice to see everything, including the two different endings that your choices influence. Plus, throughout your playthroughs it’s not clear which of these choices affect the endings; thus, you might end up having to play the game several times until you manage to hit the good ending (or follow a step-by-step guide, although at the moment of writing this review there is none available).
Yet, even with these issues related to achievement completion, the journey is entirely worth it for the story. Blueberry is a beautiful, heavy, and deeply necessary experience that reminds us that while we cannot change the beginning of our story, we always have the power to write a peaceful ending.
⚠️ Content Warning: This game deals with heavy themes regarding mental health, childhood trauma, and the suicide/self-harm of a close person.