The Blob

The Blob is Hedgeworth Games' 2017 web incremental about growing a blob, announced on r/incremental_games as version 0.5 with a call for browser testers, and it is the catalog's most explicitly unfinished entry by design. Its developer went by u/hedgeworth2016, its own subreddit r/TheBlobIncremental existed for it, and the last update recorded anywhere in the paper trail is December 20, 2017.

What it was

A 2D browser incremental where you grow a blob, in beta. That is the whole verifiable description, and it comes from the announcement thread, The Blob v0.5: Browser game testing required, which corroborates the title, the genre and the platform. The testers who replied left the sort of feedback small browser games live on: a few dozen manual clicks to keep the incremental spirit going is fine, it is a fun little game, the design is excellent. Manual clicking plus blob growth, per the community's own words, is the entire documented loop.

The surrounding paper trail is small but real. The subreddit dedicated to the game, the developer's Reddit profile, and a seed record noting platform Web, style 2D, status beta, and offline play all agree with each other. No other web incremental titled exactly The Blob surfaced in research, which is its own kind of confirmation: the identity is a high-confidence match on every axis anyone could check.

The verification story

This entry's shortness is a record of what could and could not be confirmed, and the catalog chose to keep the receipts. The play URL, a plain-HTTP personal domain, could not be curl-checked because the network verification was blocked by the local consent gate, so the site is a defunct candidate rather than a confirmed corpse. No imagery was recovered, no screenshots extracted, and the research file carries an explicit next-pass list: verify liveness, fetch the page, pull assets with sidecars. Identity is the one thing verified at high confidence; playability, imagery and defunct status all remain honestly open.

Where it stands

Eight years of silence after a beta announcement usually settles these questions, and the entry's tags say defunct-likely for exactly that reason. But likely is the operative word. If the blob still grows somewhere on a forgotten subdomain, this is a live beta from 2017 waiting to be rediscovered; if it does not, this is a eulogy for a game whose community was one subreddit and whose paper trail is one thread. Either way the catalog would rather show the gaps than paper over them, and the entry is built so a future verification pass can upgrade it in place: confirm the URL, set the defunct flag with a reason, and the question mark becomes a date.

The verdict

Identity verified, everything else pending, nothing invented. The Blob stays in the catalog as the honest shape of an unverified game: a title, a thread, a subreddit, and a question mark the size of a domain name.