Blippo+

​​The date was the 30th of March, 1997. The UK launched Channel 5 with the sort of hype usually reserved for royal weddings and new Walkers crisps flavours. The adverts promised glossy American imports, edgy late-night films, and the kind of daytime TV that could knock Robert Kilroy Silk on his arse. But there was a catch: if you lived in the southeast of England, like I did, there was a zero per cent chance that your TV aerial could pick it up. Regardless of this, I spent that evening seeing if I could intercept anything resembling a signal. Despite my best efforts, there was not a Spice Girl or Family Affair to be found. 

Why am I bringing this up? Because that’s exactly what playing Blippo+ feels like: desperately tuning into a broadcast signal you aren’t supposed to receive. 

Developed as a collaborative project between Telefantasy Studios, YACHT, Noble Robot, and Dustin Mierau, Blippo+ has been brought to life by over 100 artists, musicians, comedians, actors, and performers from Los Angeles’ vibrant underground. Originally announced as the surprise finale of Playdate’s Season 2, it’s now ready to grace Steam and the Nintendo Switch – and much like the early days of television itself, it’s making the leap from low-fi black and white to glorious, yet equally low-fi, technicolour. 

Billed as a “game”, the reality is far stranger: Blippo+ is an alien broadcast simulator, a living collage of oddball channels airing everything from the bizarre clone-based medical soap opera Clone Trois to the avian-fronted culinary showcase Snacks Alive! to my personal favourite – the meditative yet bleak Bushwalker, a piece of slow TV that recalls the ominous, drifting tone of the experimental horror film In a Violent Nature. 

The programming on offer is incredibly varied and is accessible via your traditional Electronic Programme Guide, with each week’s schedule being updated and delivered via downloadable data packets. 

The one key unifying factor throughout Blippo+ is the absurd, surrealist sense of humour injected into every single broadcast. Its style leans into awkward exaggeration, hyper-artificial presentation, and in-your-face irreverence, often embracing nonsense wordplay and off-kilter logic that keeps the audience constantly wrong-footed.

Every good game needs a good narrative, and beneath the surreal, analogue window-dressing lies a whisper of story. The broadcasts aren’t just random and, in fact, hint at a larger phenomenon known as “The Bend”, a kind of signal interference or cosmic bleed-through on Planet Blip. Piecing together these scattered hints becomes the real “gameplay”. There are no objectives on-screen, but players hungry for a proper narrative find themselves building their own theories, connecting dots across episodes like detectives tuning in from afar.  

Unlike the Playdate version of Blippo+, where content was delivered week by week with no way to rewind or skip ahead, the Steam and Switch versions loosen those constraints considerably. The full-colour presentation immediately shifts the tone, making costumes, props, and sets feel more vivid and detailed, while still allowing you to toggle the classic monochrome look with the single press of a button should you crave that lo-fi austerity.

More importantly, there is also a time-hopping mechanic, allowing you to move back and forth through the broadcast schedule, revisiting earlier programming or skipping to catch up on what you missed. The result is that these versions feel less like a rigid signal from another dimension and more like a rich media archive you can dig into at will. It trades some of the Playdate’s eerie “live broadcast” immediacy for accessibility and player control, but both approaches carve out their own identities: one preserves the uncanny fragility of a signal you might lose at any moment, while the other offers a fuller, more flexible window into Planet Blip. 

Aesthetically, the channels on offer in Blippo+ are staged like regular television but are filmed with the sensibility of poorly realised performance art – with jarring editing and collage-style effects, crash zooms, awkward cuts, and green-screen oddities that remain consistently inconsistent. If the visuals resemble an unstable TV signal, then the audio completes the illusion. Blippo+ is drenched in sound design that feels equal parts soundtrack and interference. Dialogue is delivered with exaggerated sincerity or awkward pauses, often layered with the muffled hiss of VHS degradation. Musical stings veer between stock jingles, unnerving drones, and playful original compositions from Grammy-nominated composers Rob Kieswetter and Jona Bechtolt of YACHT.  

And then there are the performances. The underground LA art scene provides a broad range of delivery styles – from deadpan absurdism to overcooked melodrama. Much like the visuals, the voices never aim for “realism”. Instead, they lean into awkwardness, exaggeration, or forced cheer. It’s the kind of comedy where the silence after a punchline is just as important as the gag itself. From audio and video down to the performances – nothing about Blippo+ is slick, but then it isn’t supposed to be. The deliberate awkwardness is the point, creating an atmosphere that’s at once hilarious, uncomfortable, and oddly hypnotic.  

Having played the Steam Deck version for the purpose of this review, I’m pleased to say both the touchscreen and trackpads are also supported, with the latter providing a physical cursor to navigate the in-game menu and programme guide for those seeking more of a desktop experience. 

Blippo+ is unlike any piece of interactive media I’ve experienced in maybe forever. No, there isn’t a lot for you to do per se – this isn’t your typical interactive experience by any stretch of the imagination, and your mileage with it will greatly depend on how weird and downright random your sense of humour is. That aside, there is just so much to appreciate on a production level that I must recommend this to anyone who is just a fan of art in general.