Blupimania

About the game

Blupimania begins with a little yellow creature called Blupi who climbs out of a hole holding a balloon, and promptly lets it fly away. Lost, he walks about without thinking, turning left or right, and the riddle ends only when he finds another balloon. You cannot steer him directly. Instead you change the world he walks through: put up a fence so he does not fall into a hole, open a door or switch a machine on, so that the path he follows by himself leads to the balloon.

There are more than 120 riddles, grouped in four levels of increasing difficulty. A riddle has to be solved before the next one opens, but you can always go back to an earlier one or jump between the levels. In some riddles Blupi has an antenna, and then you can drive him yourself with the arrow keys and use him to place things where you want them; other Blupis may be wandering around on their own, and every one of them has to find a balloon before the riddle is solved. A fifth level lets you build riddles of your own. The game was created by EPSITEC in 1994 as a Smaky and DOS game, and was released as free software, with all its art, sound and music, in 2023.

Playing it here

Click Play and the title screen appears with a short animation. Click once to reach the name screen, pick one of the four buttons to choose a player (a name you type is kept for you), then press Play, or Rules for an explanation of the game. The game shows its screens in English, French or German according to the language of your browser. Your progress is stored in your browser when you save with F9, and F10 loads it again. The game pauses when you switch to another tab.

The first start downloads about 17 MB, most of it music. "Quit" simply starts the game again.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Watch first. Start a riddle and just let Blupi walk for a moment: the way he turns at every obstacle tells you where the world needs to change.

Nothing is final. Objects you place can be changed again; nothing in a riddle is lost by experimenting.

Slow down or speed up. F5 slows the action to a crawl for tricky timing, and F7 speeds up a path you already know is right.

Read the in-game rules. The Rules button has an illustrated explanation of the game and its objects.

Credits and licence

Blupimania is an original creation of EPSITEC SA: Daniel Roux wrote it in 1994-1996, with levels by Daniel Roux, Denis Dumoulin, Anny-Sylvie Crisinel and Jean-François Crisinel, and a DOS port by Michaël Walz. Mathieu Schroeter ported it to SDL2 and released it as free software in 2023. The game and everything that comes with it, art, sound and music included, is under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. This version is compiled from the source code in the project's repository for WebAssembly, with a small change to where the game keeps its save file; the complete source of what is served, including that change, is hosted alongside the game. It uses SDL2, SDL2_image, SDL2_mixer, libogg, libvorbis, libpng, zlib and libwebp. The licence texts are linked from this page.