Blueberry Review

Allow me to state the obvious: it is remarkably hard to give a thorough writeup for a game that you have not finished. I personally don’t consider a review game done until I’ve at least rolled credits, even if that means slogging through an experience I strongly dislike to get there. As with most things in life, though, there is an exception to this; some games are simply unfinishable, and Blueberry unfortunately falls into this category.

Blueberry is a narrative journey that follows the titular character from young childhood all the way through to her elderly years. The game begins in the present day, peeking in on Blueberry’s strained relationship with her adult son, before heading back to where it all started in her childhood many years ago.

From the very opening, the game strives to be a hard-hitting and emotional tale. Blueberry’s earliest memories are a window into a family affected by poverty and alcohol abuse; at kindergarten age, she doesn’t have the perspective to see the bigger picture, but as an adult looking in on this helpless child, your own heart breaks. While much of the focus in the narrative is around Blueberry’s difficult relationship with her mother, the game is careful not to position her mother as an all-out villain. Blueberry’s mother carries her own traumas, having lost her parents fleeing the Stasi in East Germany during her younger years, and is doing her best with what she has. Is she the present, attentive parental figure that you’d wish for every child? Not by a long shot, but the game asks you to hold compassion for her – even as she stumbles over and over again.

I think ultimately this is a big part of what Blueberry was going for with its narrative. It’s easy to feel righteous anger when someone is abusive and clearly in the wrong, but real life is often a lot more complicated than that. Sometimes people get hurt, not out of malice but because someone’s best intentions were pointed in a well-meaning but ultimately harmful direction, and healing needs to come from a place that recognises the complexity of the situation.

I have to hedge this with ‘I think’, though, because the wheels (and everything else) start falling off as soon as the train leaves the station. The game is absolutely riddled with bugs on the Switch 2, with these ranging from simple animation glitches to crashes which happened so frequently that I ended up losing count. A serious bug in the underlying scene selection causes unintentional time skips within the narrative’s nonlinear structure – Blueberry in her later years reflects on moments from earlier in her life, but the game would often play these later scenes far ahead of their true place in the narrative, resulting in a totally broken chronology that made the story difficult to follow while also sapping the journey of its intended emotional weight.

This broken chronology also led to an entire chapter of the story being skipped in both of my playthrough attempts. The first time this happened, a separate bug in the autosave caused an impassable softlock and I had to start the game again. I got a little further in my next playthrough but ended up getting softlocked once again, with the game transporting me to a much earlier place on the map and I could not open a progress gate to move forward. At that point it was clear that this game wasn’t going to let me finish it, no matter how hard I tried.

It’s a real shame too, because what I did see of Blueberry had potential. While the dialogue was at points heavy-handed, I really wanted to see where the story would lead and how Blueberry would heal from her traumas – if in fact she did. The art style is gorgeous with thoughtful use of colour and light, and tiny elements hidden in the characterisation and environments reward you for paying attention to out-of-the-way details. The soundtrack and the sound effects are also very solid, adding an immersive richness to the world – even if that world ultimately wasn’t one that I could explore.

Final Thoughts

Blueberry might have had the bones of something good hidden within it, but something went seriously wrong bringing this game to life on the Nintendo Switch. At the end of the day, you simply can’t recommend a game that isn’t playable, and Blueberry is a hard pass on that account.