‘Noby Noby Boy’ Review (PSN)

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‘Noby Noby Boy’ Review (PSN)

Sat, Feb 21, 2009

"Noby Noby Boy," the latest work from the creator of "Katamari Damacy," is brilliant -- but largely pointless.

Set loose in one of a wide variety of digital jungle gyms, you control the titular "Boy" -- basically an anthropomorphic elastic cord with legs -- on a quest to stretch his rainbow-colored wormlike midsection as much as humanly possible.

And for the first several hours, while you discover the joyous multitude of things you can do with your stretchy digital rope, the game's inspired controls and wacky physics engine, "Noby Noby Boy" is great fun.

I particularly enjoyed becoming a humongous house-shaped party popper;

Taking local citizens and wildlife on a flying roller-coaster ride;

and lassoing the game's donut-shaped rain clouds for my own nefarious purposes -- all while listening to my own custom PS3 soundtrack.

And there are plenty more experiences like these in "Noby Noby Boy." If you can see it, you can almost always wrap around it, eat it or mess with it in some way, and it feels like you've discovered something new and amazing each time.

But after I'd finished interacting with a few dozen varieties of wacky physics playgrounds, eaten hundreds of their inhabitants and still barely made a dent in the high score metagame (as it turns out, all owners of "Noby Noby Boy" are working together behind the scenes, adding their total stretch lengths together to make a giant elastic worm named "Girl" stretch from Earth to other planets), I started to get bored.

There simply isn't that much to do in "Noby Noby Boy," and no real challenge to be had in doing it.

As a gadget, a toy, a conversation piece to be tried in turn by each interested individual at a party, "Noby Noby Boy" is marvelous, and as such it's no surprise that the game comes with its own YouTube video uploader. If you're into showing your friends the latest and greatest, "Noby Noby" is well worth the $5.

But if you're looking for the next "Katamari," you won't find it here.

Note: reviewer played "Noby Noby Boy" on Earth only. Should the game change substantially from planet to planet, GameCyte will update this review accordingly.