As part of their Spring Fever line of titles for the PlayStation 3, Sony announced that the latest game from designer Keita Takahashi would be coming to the PlayStation Network this month. His previous game, Katamari Damacy was a sleeper hit and a cult favourite for a lot of PS2 owners, so much so that it warranted a sequel that was basically a thank you to the US audience that fell in love with the game. It was noted for being fairly unconventional and extremely light-hearted, which is exactly what people were expected for the PSN title Noby Noby Boy. The game was on my list for most anticipated title on the PSN, and though I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the game was all about from the limited amount of information that was being released it is always intriguing to have a perspective on gaming that comes from someone who admittedly never plays them.

Noby Noby Boy is very non-threatening, but also fairly confusing to start with. You’re put into this world, introduced to all of the main characters and run through a quick quiz which should be fairly straight-forward for anyone used to standard game conventions but perhaps a bit frustrating to those who aren’t. Still, what you are shown is this blocky, colourful plane that looks like it is basically floating in space. You take the role of Boy, a four-legged tube sock that you control either end of with the left and right stick of the controller. Boy can stretch, wrap around objects, eat anything in the world if you are large enough to consume it, and then subsequently fire it out from your rear end when you’ve eaten too much. As strange as it all sounds, the real goal of the whole thing is to simply experiment with the world around you and grow by stretching out your front and rear end in opposite directions, wrapping around objects to take up as much landscape as possible. There are no real limits, and everything you eat reappears after it has been expelled, so on the surface there really isn’t a whole lot to the world.

When you’ve gotten to a sufficient length, however, the real charm of the game is revealed. While there are no individual goals, there is a universal objective shared by every single person who is playing the game. Floating in space is the other main character, Girl, whose length is determined by the reported length from all players of Noby Noby Boy across all territories. At any time during the game you can stop stretching and report your length, which stretches out Girl further in the sky. When the game was launched, you started on Earth and that was the exclusive planet you were able to explore. Four days into the game’s release, however, the collective length of Girl had reached over 350,000 km, which is the approximate distance between the Earth and the Moon, which meant that the Moon was now a playable planet. That, in effect, is what makes the game a unique experience. The collective struggle towards unlocking more worlds to explore, which doesn’t give you an extremely varied amount of gameplay difference (a few different terrain colours, odd gravity and weird new creatures) but it is a goal that all those who are experiencing the game share. So far it seems that Girl is growing at a rate of around 60,000 km a day and with Mars about 50,000,000 km from Earth it is going to be a long and fun road to get there.

It’s difficult to recommend this game to everyone, as there really isn’t a lot too the gameplay. You stretch, you goof around in this oddly stylized virtual playground with no apparently rhyme or reason other than to extend the gargantuan Girl floating somewhere above you. It is an interesting exploration of a global goal, and it does have a primitive but fun ranking system that shows where you fit on the world’s contributed length list. The game has trophy support, though all of them but one are secret trophies which are as strange and random as the game appears to be. Although it may be a bit confusing at first, there is a detailed manual built into the game and a lot of interesting features built-in, like video capture and the ability to upload your play time to YouTube. Noby Noby Boy doesn’t require a huge time investment, and doesn’t seem to change much from play to play, but watching your Boy grow and how the world is expanding Girl is interesting enough to keep you coming back and pumping more meters into the project. It is silly, but it can be a lot of fun, and the charm of the whole experience was not lost on me in any way, although it’s hard to be truly objective when I was such a big fan of Katamari Damacy and have been eagerly awaiting this title. It is worth a look and being a part of the race to the next planet is reason enough to keep me checking back, looking at my ranking on Girl and exploring the world playground that Takahashi has created for you to goof around in without consequence, collectibles of complex objectives. Just eat and stretch.

So what I’m really trying to say is…
Noby Noby Boy is as about as strange as the title seems to indicate. It’s a colourful and charming series of similar playgrounds where you control either end of a elongated creature of some sort and just stretch until you can’t possible gain any length. The global objective of gaining length to move to the next planet is interesting, and while it still leaves a lot of the game to be discovered and means a lot is still unplayable, the base of what is there is already pretty simple. Don’t expect too much varied gameplay, but if you’re up for a strange break in pace and a global collaboration give it a try.

Noby Noby Boy is published by Namco Bandai and is available on the PSN for $4.99 (USD/CDN). Game played for approximately 3 hours, over 25 km in length reached.