Blanc (2023)

Blanc is certainly cozy, cute, and charming, and it deserves high marks for its aesthetics and ideas, but I can’t deny how frustrated I felt while playing it. There were some high moments where cub and fawn flew through the frozen fields, delicately criss-crossing darkened paths in an otherwise blinding white spendor, but they were often followed by whiplashed lows of missing actionable cues and odd technical difficulties. If Blanc speaks to you, I think you’ll enjoy it, but if you’re on the fence, give the dev team some time to address the issues. Until then, Blanc remains the perfect example of a snow day — enjoyable in theory as long as you don’t have to travel.

Controlling one character per Joy-Con is an annoying experience I wouldn't suggest. The real stand out here is the soundtrack. I would put this soundtrack in the same tier as games like Hollow Knight and Ori and the Blind Forest. My biggest takeaway is that the Blanc soundtrack should be on everyone's playlists, even if the game itself shouldn't.

From the game's logo alone we can understand its intention to approach the theme of duality with the dark wolf perched on the lap of the white deer creating a variation of the yin-yang symbol. This color symbolism is also carried over to the game with most of the objects that the wolf interacts with being black, while the corresponding ones that the deer interacts with are white.

Blanc is a charming and extremely short adventure game that features challenging puzzles and a beautiful, minimalist art style that should occupy you and a friend for an hour or two.

Blanc is a game with heart, and it'll definitely bring you and a player two together. I can't recommend it over some other recent co-op outings, but it's still an experience worth having if you can ignore a couple of issues.