Review: Noby Noby Boy

How does one explain Noby Noby Boy? Created by Keita Takahashi, the visionary behind Katamari Damacy, Noby Noby Boy was originally revealed as a relaxing game about stretching. That’s it. There are no goals, no objectives, no death, and no adversaries (save perhaps physics). The game was meant to be in the same vein as Katamari before it, but something almost entirely different; something primal and childlike, but also hilarious and heartwarming.

Noby Noby Boy is in fact all of those things. The game does indeed have no real objective other than to stretch your character (aptly named Boy), and have fun with the randomly generated environment, using physics, a healthy appetite, and a little imagination. It has its fair share of meta-goals and hidden objectives, but Noby Noby Boy is, at its core, a fantastical sandbox built around discovery and experimentation.

Taking place on a randomly generated patch of land, a game session characteristically consists of leaving Boy’s house, stretching Boy using the analog sticks, and then proceeding to eat random objects in the environment using L2. The word random is not meant to be lightly used in this case. The amount of variety in the game is startling at times. Everything from motorcycles to giant strawberries are available, edible, and tied to the everloving laws of physics. People also litter the environment; oddities that span both place and time.

Outside of the basic stretching and experimentation, the game does have its own set of trophies. While they’re all meant to be secret for the sake of experimentation, a few sites spoiled the surprises and revealed what each was. While some were simple and would have been achieved simply by playing and testing the boundaries of the game world, a few would have been near impossible to achieve without knowing the requirements ahead of time. Even with that knowledge, the trophies still remain a joy to unlock, and give skeptical players a good framework of the game’s possibilities and palpable goals to achieve.

Even if trophies had been overlooked, though, it would be wrong to say that the game lacks goals of any kind would be inaccurate. As Boy stretches and bounces around, the player can report that length to an anthropomorphic sun that looks down at the earth in eternal wonder. Once that length has been reported, the information is sent to Girl, a similar Noby Noby creature who is slowly growing from Earth out into space based on the stretching lengths reported to her.

The genius of this overarching metagame is partly its simplicity, and partly its strict adherence to the game’s tenets of exploration and discovery. Using the magic of the internet, every single player participating in Noby Noby Boy contributes to Girl’s journey through space, making the game a single player, but massively collaborative effort that, at least on message boards, has had a surprisingly positive effect on communities playing the game. The net effect of Girl’s journey is the encounter of new planets, starting with the Earth’s moon, and followed by Mars. As of this writing, the community has reached the moon. The giddy excitement of what new creatures, environments and physics we would encounter there was incredibly exhilerating, and the idea of unlocking something with a group of people that had never been seen before made me feel like I was part of something important. For some, that is perhaps the real driving force behind the game’s addictive elements.

Noby Noby Boy is an incredibly endearing, lovable and whimsical dream that, if you so choose, has no objective but to have fun and stretch. For those that want more structure, the metagame might not be enough to be considered a tangible objective, but there’s something to be said for its unmistakable, but equally unexplainable addictive nature. To top it all off, the PSN downloadable title sells for $4.99 or ￥800, making it a nearly risk-free venture into the unknown. That is the spirit of the game after all.