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At every turn, I wonder if WayForward’s Wii-exclusive A Boy and His Blob is doing enough.

Does the box art stand out on the Wii racks filled with Game Party and flash puzzle ports and no-name platformers?

Is there enough residual brand awareness to draw in those who would have played this franchise twenty years ago on NES and Game Boy?

Does the 2D style look classy and polished, or does it come off as a budget title?

Is the game BIG enough?

A Boy and His Blob begins very simply. There’s a short cutscene, and the Boy wakes up in his coolass treehouse. The first mission is to go find Blob, and from there you head into a hub-based level structure (still the treehouse) where you essentially choose each level one at a time.

If you remember the formula of the original games, you’ll be right at home. You still toss jellybeans to determine the type and location of the Blob’s transformation. You need to utilize Blob’s various forms to get to the end of each linear, 2D platformer level. It’s classic lock-and-key stuff. Each board has three hidden treasures to collect and if you find all three you get a bonus level… finishing each bonus level reveals some production artwork unlockables.

It’s cute. It’s simple. There’s a Hug button. But here’s my First Thirty concerns:

- Complete lack of instruction. I get that the game avoids any kind of HUD interface for a clean look, and I applaud that. But you’d think the first level would at least tell you how to choose a jellybean and throw it. That’s not “encouraging exploration,” that’s just plain unfriendly.

- The jellybean wheel. You have to hold down a button and rotate the analog stick around a circular menu to select your jellybean. This sucks. Especially in the early levels where you only have three types of beans to choose from, it just seems like it would be more efficient and quicker to use the -/+ buttons to cycle through the options. Additionally, managing the analog stick on that menu is needlessly difficult for younger players.

- The puns are gone. “Tangerine trampoline” and the like. These seem to exist solely in the manual, not the game. On the bean wheel, you just see a bean’s color and a picture of the Blob transformation.

- Bite-size gameplay. Maybe I’ve got this wrong, but when I played Rescue of Princess Blobbette on Game Boy, I remember it being all one big world to explore. Not a hundred mini-levels. This makes the game feel small and lacking. I don’t feel like I’m on an epic quest, I feel like I’m playing an iPhone game. Maybe later levels will get larger and become more connected to the level before.

- The 2D design. Those still screenshots looked great, didn’t they? …The game doesn’t look that great in motion. The watercolor art design is nice, but most of the levels are flat, unanimated boards. The game will drop in tiny hopping frogs, and you see the occasional waving palm frond… but most of the actual level is completely still and lifeless. Which makes the thorough character animation of the Boy and the Blob seem out of place. Both Warioland: Shake It and the 360′s Braid did 2D better.

- No GameCube controller support. I know I can’t keep bawling for Cube controllers forever, but if a game supports the Classic Controller (as Blob does), you’d think they could include a GameCube option. I’d much rather use a d-pad for this kind of gameplay. Sometimes it’s touchy to go up a ladder with the analog stick.

- Being limited to certain types of jellybeans per level sucks. Outright sucks. Not only is it frustrating – what do you mean I can’t use a ladder on this board? – but it makes no narrative sense. Why would the Boy suddenly forget one flavor of jellybean? It’s a very arbitrary, video game-y stunt to add difficulty. Although it is a boon to no longer “run out” of jellybeans as you could in the older games.

On the plus side, I’m sure there are gamers that are in the market for a low-impact adventure puzzle game like this one. The characters and enemies are nicely animated, and the puzzle-platforming seems solid. You’ll definitely be able to spend a lot of time picking through the solutions, which rely on ever-more-complicated arrangements of Blob modes. The first boss was cool, so I expect more of that to come.

A Boy and His Blob retails for only $40, which may ameliorate some of the concerns. I get the impression that there’s a lot of gameplay here (a hundred puzzley, blobby levels), but it’s not exactly inspiring me to devote a lot of time to it right now.