Blanc Review: Searching for Family in a Too-Wholesome Black-and-White World

Emptiness resonates troublingly at the heart of Casus Ludi’s hand-drawn co-op adventure game.

Blanc
Photo: Gearbox Publishing

Emptiness resonates troublingly at the heart of Casus Ludi’s hand-drawn co-op adventure game Blanc. That’s not a knock against its stunning black-and-white design, a glorious chiaroscuro vision that’s only minimalistic at first blush. But given that its plot and optional cooperative gameplay remain so resolutely one-dimensional, and that the impressions left by its abandoned settings go no deeper than footprints in snow, this slight tale of a lost black wolf cub and white fawn cannot help but leave the player feeling more than a little cold.

Your goal throughout Blanc is to navigate the cub and fawn through a series of short chapters, following the trail of their respective families. But the game’s linear nature is such that it precludes the risk of getting lost, as does the color-coded objects that represent the things that each animal can interact with. The wolf can bite through ropes and squeeze through narrow holes, while the fawn can leap to ridges or bend down to serve as a makeshift step stool. The fawn also weighs a bit more, which is relevant insofar as it aids the player during a few obviously designed puzzles where the critter must stand on conveniently placed seesaw-like levers.

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The game’s point would seem to be that either of these creatures would die if they were to ever drift apart, and that they’re destined to find their families if they work together. But Blanc isn’t alive to those possibilities. The game’s dynamic camera is designed to keep both protagonists on screen at once, so there’s no chance of them being separated, and though supporting characters fall off bridges and ledges, they’re always fine because in this anesthetized world, snow is only ever a good thing—that is, a cushion against death. Blanc is set in a world pockmarked with abandoned human settlements, and across which you will encounter stray animals, but the journey never feels dangerous, nor is it sadly clarifying of the events that led to this desolation.

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Perhaps as a result, there’s no sense of urgency to the cub and fawn’s adventure throughout. Logic, too, doesn’t prevail across the game’s short campaign. At one point, when a mother duck frets about how her children keep getting blown off a path that you come across, the cub and fawn use their bodies to block the gusty gales and escort her kids to safety. In such moments, you may wonder how this family made it this far, why the mother duck couldn’t shield her ducklings from the wind herself. And that’s because the moments feel like puzzles for puzzle’s sake, which wouldn’t matter too much if the game’s mechanics were more up to par.

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Blanc abounds in beautifully layered textures, with sharp distinctions between foreground and background planes. Which makes it all the more frustrating that such intricacy isn’t present in the text-free story, which at times devolves into bland obstacle courses that seem to exist only to disguise the monotony of the game’s mechanics. Except perhaps for the lack of sustenance in this world that goes undiscussed, there’s no element of surprise here, as the cub and fawn set out to find their families and accomplish just that. The humans are missing, and nobody cares, not even the domesticated sheep left behind in the stables that are somehow still alive.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Zebra Partners.

Score: 
 Developer: Casus Ludi  Publisher: Gearbox Publishing  Platform: PC  Release Date: February 14, 2023  ESRB: E  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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