If you’re anything like me, staying up late to watch weird TV shows has irreparably fried your brain. Sorry about it, but the good news is that brain frying has perfectly prepared you for one of the most inventive games of the year, and one of the funniest games ever made.
Blippo+ debuted earlier in 2025 on the hand-cranked portable console, the Playdate, before bringing a new full-color version to Nintendo Switch and PC on September 25. Blippo+ is, well, it’s hard to describe, for one. Booting the game up presents you with a scrolling channel guide, showing what’s playing on TV across the planet Blip. Each channel is constantly playing a selection of roughly two-minute-long shows and you can tune in and out whenever you want, channel-surfing at your leisure.
Gameplay is practically nonexistent, and just as irrelevant, in Blippo+. It is, as its developers describe it, “a live-action, new wave, off-cable TV simulator.” All you need to do is flip through the channels, paying as much or as little attention as you want. New shows are delivered in “data packettes,” with a new one delivered whenever you’ve watched enough of what’s currently on offer. Occasionally, the signal will get wonky and you’ll need to adjust it through a menu, but otherwise, Blippo+ is a hands-off experience, except when you’re changing to a new channel.
That makes Blippo+ perfect to passively watch during dinner or while you’re at work (not that I would ever do that). As for why you’d want to, the immediate answer is that it’s full of hilarious, imaginative, utterly bizarre shows that had laughing out loud like no other game ever has. Comedy is hard in games, where players dictating the pace can spoil the timing of an otherwise good joke, and Blippo+ gets around that by just taking that control out of players’ hands entirely.
Everything airing on Blippo+ is set on the Earth-like planet Blip, with different flora and fauna and a whole alternate pop culture history, that seems to be simultaneously stuck in both the ‘80s and ‘90s. Its shows emulate a combination of low-budget, late-night TV and public access programming, ranging from music video channels and cooking shows to a sitcom following the adventures of an alien bartender. Some highlights include “Clone Trois,” a medical soap opera where every character is played by a clone of the same actress, “Boredome,” a Zoom-style variety show hosted by Blippian teens, and “Quizzards,” a combination trivia show and Dungeons & Dragons adventure.
If all Blippo+ had to offer was its charmingly absurd alien programming, it would still be worth tuning in, but it’s the story between the channels that cements it as one of the year’s best. As Blippo+’s programming begins, planet Blip has just made first contact with extraterrestrials via a ripple in space called the Bend. It turns out Blip can send its TV signals through the Bend, and the story following first contact plays out in snippets across the channels. The hosts of science shows are first to catch on, but little by little, the threat and possibility of alien contact becomes the subject of more shows, while stop-motion kids cartoons and workout routines continue to play around them.
That Blippo+ can tell the story of alien contact and the televised revolution that follows without ever losing an iota of its comedic edge is extremely impressive. Whether you sit and pay rapt attention or simply let its shows play in the background a few at a time across days or weeks, Blippo+ is a storytelling feat. By the end of its programming, I had favorite shows and those I always skipped over and felt as plugged into Blippian trends and gossip as if I’d been watching for years.
Blippo+ is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, and Playdate.