Review: NOBY NOBY BOY (PSN)

I've seen things you wouldn't believe.

The latest game from Keita Takahashi, creator of the Katamari Damacy games, comes NOBY NOBY BOY, and it's like nothing I've ever seen. You play as BOY, a strange character, to say the least. By default, he's a small, pink, four-legged... something or other. You control the front end with the Left Stick, and the rear end with the Right Stick. By moving the ends away from each other, BOY will get longer and more centipede-like. That's just about all there is to the game. You are told at the beginning of the game that there are no objectives, no enemies, just BOY and GIRL (more on her in a minute). Much like a few of the other games on PSN, NOBY is an experiment. The thing that separates NOBY from all of the other experimental games is that it works. Just like Katamari, NOBY is very quirky, strange, and brilliant.

When you start a game, You are sent to a randomly generated map, a fairly small chunk of floating land. Since the levels are randomly generated, you will run into some really weird things, like maybe a map full of giant frogs and floating sharks, a planet with nothing but goths, or a map with a mummy driving a monster truck (I swear, those all happened to me). Also in the maps are objects which you can interact with, like arches that you can wrap yourself around, or windmills, which really make for some good fun (imagine sticking a piece of string into a fan), and even the clouds are donut-shaped.

Along with just walking around on the ground, BOY has a few "abilities", and I use that word very loosely. BOY can fly in a floaty, very Kirby-like way, allowing you to get to things up in the sky, like the neat-looking clouds. Next, BOY can swallow people, animals, and objects, again, much like Kirby. If BOY is in his default tiny form, when he eats something, he automatically... disposes of it. Through his ass. If he is long, however, he can swallow several things at a time, and they will appear as lumps in his body. Picture a snake that just swallowed a rabbit. It looks exactly like that.

One of the things that makes NOBY so entertaining is the AI. People and animals will move throughout the maps, maybe by walking, driving, flying, or whatever. If you don't move BOY for a minute or two, AI will take over, and even he will begin walking through the level, knocking over people on bikes, and scaring chickens, and other weird things. If, when you're controlling BOY, you move him next to a person or animal, they will sometimes jump on his back and start riding, and sometimes, an AI controlled person will randomly jump on the back of an animal.

Another of the things that makes NOBY so great is that the game keeps up with your stats, like how long you are, how long you have been, and how long you have been altogether, with all your lengths added together. If you want to be a team player and help out the NOBY community, you can report your length to GIRL, who grows accordingly to the length you reported. The cool part is that everyone who reports to GIRL gets their length added, so everyone is constantly making GIRL longer. When GIRL gets long enough to reach the Moon, then everyone in the world actually gets new maps set on the moon, complete with new objects and AI controlled beings. This is a really cool way to get everyone in the world to work together to get new content for the game. As of this writing, nearly 7,000 people have contributed over 81.2 million meters to GIRL.

The last of my favorite features is the connectivity with YouTube. Users can record in-game footage with the built-in recorder, and the upload directly to YouTube to show all your friends how you can tie yourself into knots. You can also take in-game screenshots, which is a pretty neat feature.

As awesome as the gameplay is, I have a few minor gripes, mainly about the rather confusing controls. Making BOY move is easy enough, but you have to tap L2 or R2 to jump, hold L2 in about halfway to open your mouth to eat, hold L2 or R2 to anchor yourself, and repeatedly tap L2 and R2 to fly. That's just BOY. The camera is also pretty hard to control. You have to hold L1 and tilt the controller forward and backwards using the PS3's Sixaxis to zoom the camera, and hold L1 and R1 and tilt the controller to have full control of the camera. As confusing as all this sounds, the controls can be learned in just a little while, it just takes a while to get the hang of it.

NOBY NOBY BOY is a great game. It's one of the very few experimental games that really works. I wish developers would take a good look at NOBY, and start trying new and outlandish things. The videogame industry needs more ambitious titles like NOBY. Meanwhile, NOBY is only $5 in the PlayStation Store, so if you like fun, weird, quirky games, then definitely check this out. Or if you just like playing games that look like you're on Acid. Either way, check it out. 5 out of 5.