Blocks For Babies Demo Preview

One of the most prominent trends in indie gaming is seeing the mashup of two genres or themes to make something entirely new. There’s Moonlighter, and its relaxing shop management playing opposite its loot-gathering dungeon crawling. Dredge is perfect for fans of both fishing and eldritch horror, and Cult of the Lamb intersects village management with tight combat. In many cases, these concoctions can best be summed up as, “It’s like if X and Y had a baby!” And now, after checking out the playtest for Blocks for Babies from BunkSoft Interactive, I can already tell it promises to be its own uniquely improbable newborn of an idea that no one else would have conceived for a long time to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM8GCZZQ82s

The game invents this premise: what if classic block-stacking puzzle gameplay had moments where the tetriminos stopped falling for a second so you could descend onto the board, land on your feet in first-person boomer shooter mode, and take care of misbehaving blocks with some good old fashioned firepower? Doubling down on these juxtaposed styles, what if the puzzling felt entirely cozy (heck, maybe some of the pieces could have cute faces on them) while the shooting moments threw you into a tormented hellscape where cube-clearing felt like murdering demons?

Before any of the babyish blocks or brutal bloodshed, Blocks for Babies has you knocking on a door and meeting Flapper, a bunny-eared, rosy-cheeked, squiggly-shaped yellow guy who needs help cleaning up his house. Many strewn blocks have managed to group themselves into seven familiar formations, and this is where the conventions of Tetris help you feel right at home. Holding down on the D-pad will make blocks fall faster. Pressing up will drop pieces instantly. Filling a horizontal line completely will clear it, but if those blocks reach the top, the run is over. For just a moment, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but things start feeling amiss.

Corrupted blocks with a red outline begin falling, and while they otherwise appear like any other block, creating a complete line containing them won’t actually clear them. After a number of piece placements, Flapper instructs you to target a selection of blocks to focus on, which then shifts your perspective from 2D to 3D, and now those pesky corrupted blocks have become moving enemies to shoot with pistols, shotguns, and rifles. After attacking the blocks to clear them of corruption, you have the option of returning to the surface to resume the gentler puzzling, but with enough forethought, picking off the right blocks in shooting mode can set up some satisfying line clears later on. After reaching a certain number of blocks cleared, you get to wipe the slate clean and move onto another board, and the block falling speed ticks up.

Blocks for Babies already boasts a compelling concept from the get-go, but it really excels in its variety of decisions and perks offered to the player through its roguelike construction. Picking a board to proceed with comes with a promise: clearing its block goal might provide a weapon enhancement, an activatable power that recharges after so many piece placements (such as being able to swap an annoying “Z” piece with a handy “I” piece at the press of a button), or even effects for clearing certain numbers of lines simultaneously. You might focus on electrocuting your pieces, reshaping upcoming tetriminos to make them more agreeable, or slowing down the block falling speed to give yourself time to think. And for meta progression diehards like me, I’m happy to report that a shop between runs offers plenty of permanent rewards to unlock. With so many options for active and passive gameplay alterations, the idea of discovering unusual builds is already exciting, and Tetris (and/or Doom) players of all experience levels are bound to get something new out of this.

BunkSoft Interactive is realizing some truly untapped potential with Blocks for Babies. Its latest playtest involved several game boards to try and vanquish one snakelike boss, Aikon the Unbreakable. My reward for finishing a run was a first-person interaction with the reticent Flapper, who adorably offered his hand to hold as I took a few steps through his quiet house of mysteries. There will be many developments to keep track of from here, including updates on weapons, artifacts, and story moments. I can’t say I’d otherwise expect such a successful combination of these seemingly mismatched genres within this puzzle/action game, and during its gestation, I look forward to finding what awaits us within Flapper’s suspicious abode.

Big thank you to Beau for writing this preview for the Six One Indie Showcase on May 21st, 2026. Follow Beau on Bluesky and Underplayed.