Here’s BLAMO:
It’s a game about little purple pill shaped creatures taking the train from one place to another.
(Sorry, some of my screenshots captured the previews of previous screenshots. I’m not sure why OS X does this!)
The game literally rips half of its music straight out of the Mother series. It also uses some Animal Crossing music (e.g. for the train) and some random earthboundy Soundcloud stuff. This is Roblox, so stealing music is pretty typical.
There aren’t really any objectives. The train takes you to an area, you walk around, and sometimes there’s NPCs to talk to. You wait for a new train to arrive, then you board it and go somewhere else.
The dialogue is clearly trying to be Earthboundish. There’s lots of attempts at quirkiness while occasionally trying to slip in some profundity, but none of it really works. Just the visuals and level design are nice though. There are probably hundreds of areas at this point.
To me, this is the perfect template for a hangout game. Since it’s Roblox, you’re in a server populated by 12 year olds. But you can also have a friend pop in to wander around with you. Me and my one Roblox friend used to occasionally play this at 1am, walking around random areas, pointing out to each other whatever interesting things we happened upon – but mostly we just talked about various other real life things. We’d separate each time we entered an area, but the train acted as a funnel that forced us (and everyone else in the area) to regroup. There’s almost a middle school field trip vibe to it.
I’d be interested in a studio with an actual budget and a little more experience/maturity taking this formula and making a full sized game out of it. The areas in Blamo seem to mostly be inspired by the weirder parts of Earthbound, but I actually think adding some of the mundanity that Earthbound had would make an even more interesting experience.
I know I’ve seen some other Mother-likes on Roblox. At some point I’ll systematically go through my play history and share whatever seems interesting.