Noby Noby Boy (PlayStation 3)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.5 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Carolyn Petit
• Reviewed on: 02/26/2009
• Released on: 02/19/2009
• Originally published on GameSpot: Noby Noby Boy (PlayStation 3) Review

Noby Noby Boy bears the unmistakable stamp of its creator, Keita Takahashi. Like his Katamari Damacy games, Noby Noby Boy has a charmingly simple visual style, a whimsically absurd sensibility, and gameplay that has you constantly using both thumbsticks on the Dual Shock controller to do some very unusual things. But the similarities end there. Katamari Damacy was certainly offbeat, but next to Noby Noby Boy, it looks like a downright traditional example of game design. Noby Noby Boy offers up an experience so free of goals or challenges that it ends up feeling like more of a virtual toy than a game, sort of like a really versatile Slinky that comes with its own delightful environments to explore. Whatever Noby Noby Boy is, it's fascinating, relaxing, and genuinely enjoyable.

Noby Noby Boy himself is a cute little caterpillar-like creature with two legs on his front and two legs on his rear. He's a friend to everyone. He leaves little floating hearts in his wake, and people and animals of all kinds love to hop on his back and ride around. You control Boy's front with the left thumbstick, and his rear with the right, and you can wander around the large, floating squares where Boy makes his home, or flap Boy's tiny little legs so that he takes to the sky, soaring past the donut-shaped clouds above. Each map is unique, filled with different sorts of people, animals, and objects, and part of the fun of Noby Noby Boy comes from just seeing what the next randomly generated map will bring. Will it be a world populated with magnifying-glass-wielding chefs, wandering cows, and bananas on wheels, or perhaps a place of big-chinned gendarmes, giant basketballs, and huge spinning tops?

There doesn't seem to be an end to the strange and surprising things that you can encounter in Noby Noby Boy, and each map is dynamic, with plenty of movement and activity by its inhabitants, and new people and things constantly raining down from the sky. You can interact with those people by just wandering around and giving them rides, trying to wrap yourself around them, or, most enjoyably, by eating them, which can produce some astonishing new creations. If you eat a strawberry and a cheerleader and then unceremoniously expel them from your rear, you may get a cheerleader with a smiling strawberry for a head. That may sound crude, but this is one example of how Noby Noby Boy's extremely simple graphics are an asset. The colorful and simplistic visual style makes the whole process of eating and then sending things flying out of your backside cute, funny, and completely inoffensive.

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