Noby Noby Boy (PS3) – First Impression
Following last week’s release of Flower, we find Noby Noby Boy hitting the PlayStation Store today courtesy of the creator of the Katamari Damacy series. I’ve spent an hour with game and so far have been entertained by its bizarre premise.
Noby Noby Boy is unlike anything I have ever seen. You control the front and rear ends of a creature, BOY, which has the ability to stretch to incredible lengths and consume (and poop out) objects, animals, and people populating the game’s environment, which is a small patch of rectangular land located inside of the earth. You can change the “map,” which results in a new themed area, for example, a desert, city, or prairie (among others I assume).
The amount that you stretch can be reported to the Sun, which is actually a lion perched on the top of the earth, who then communicates your accomplishments to GIRL, a galactic-scale version of BOY that measures the collective stretching progress of every Noby Noby Boy player around the world. Uh, the real world that you and I live in. Are you still following? GIRL will gradually continue to stretch herself from Earth towards the Moon, and then on to Mars, with other planets likely to follow. This reportedly will take a couple months each to accomplish. Each planetary body will open up new lands and objects for the player to consume and . . . evacuate . . . from themselves.
Upon loading up the game for the first time, the initial 5 minutes are spent in a novel tutorial which tasks you with performing actions in the game to answering simple questions about how the game is controlled. You are then introduced to the game manual which includes details on features such as creating videos of your game play experiences that can be uploaded to YouTube and how to interact with GIRL. Your cursor in the manual is a 2D version of Noby Noby Boy, which can actually fully interact with the letters and images making up the manual, scrambling them up as you move through them, and optionally sucking up and eating things as well. The manual resets itself, so you don’t have to worry about permanently ruining the instructions if you plan to actually use them instead of just playing with them.
It would be unfair to judge this game based on the little time I’ve spent with it, but it seems like something that will make for a great way to relax, and I would not be surprised to find myself frequently coming back to Noby Noby Boy for quite some time into the future. I’ll be exploring the YouTube integration in further detail soon and will continue to share my experiences with the game as they occur.
