Ahead of the Game: Glompa is a feel-good puzzler about connecting happy little blobs together
What a delightful little way to round out the year
- Connect Bloblings to clear levels
- Unlock Glompa in your Glompadex
- Indulge in some cutesy vibes this season
Hello and welcome to Ahead of the Game, a series where we tell you all about an upcoming game that, despite not being out yet, is available for you to play at the time of publishing. Through this series, you can grab a chance to play games well ahead of their release date, be that through Soft Launch, Open Beta, Demos, or more.
Cute critters with soft, rounded corners and multi-coloured blobs abound in Glompa, a charming merge-slash-matching puzzler where you connect blobs of the same colour across a grid to unlock more blobs of the same colour. They're all happily smiling up at you, by the way, which means connecting them is an absolute feel-good treat.
I'd like to think I'm freeing them from bondage by setting them free into the wild, which definitely adds to my motivation.
As you progress through the levels, you'll unlock different skills like hooks that clear adjacent Bloblings, magnets that connect similarly coloured Bloblings, and Top Hats that swap them around to your heart's desire, which can all come in handy given how puzzles get more complicated as you go along.
None of it feels stressful at all, however, mainly because the background score is just so darn chill that it's hard not to relax while you're essentially connecting the dots here.
As you level up, you'll also unlock Glompa in your Glompadex - these are basically pets that offer useful rewards when you upgrade them. My favourite so far is Ringo - a shiny red apple with some fancy green hair, who, according to the official description, "has never had to see the doctor a single day in his life."
Now, you can also see these pets hanging out and roaming around in your Village, where you can fish for some rewards and tap on your Glompa just to mess with them. Ringo, when tapped on, will sprout a worm on his head, which will make him freak out - it's just too adorable I CAN'T.
Did I mention there's a huge blob at the bottom of the screen with a froggy friend on its head? They're both just chillin' in the water, and occasionally, a butterfly will flit by to the blob's delight - and it will immediately get eaten by the frog, which makes the blob cry. I don't have a single clue as to what any of this means, but I am all for it.
So, how do you play Glompa?
The official word on Glompa is that it's already out "globally", but to tell you the truth, it's still not available in some parts of the world (our globally positioned team here at Pocket Gamer can attest to that). That makes it a semi-regional launch, and I suppose you'll just have to see if it's available in your own app stores to be sure. I hope it is, though, because everyone deserves to have awesome happy little timewasters like this in their life.
