Noby Noby Boy is a hell of a drug. It's also a hell of a puzzle game once you get past the strange lack of direction, minimal presentation and the fact that your character shits like a cannon.



You are dropped into the world and a little fairy walks you through the basics, maybe uselessly. Operating the game is quite easy; the left stick and trigger operate the front half of BOY and the right stick and trigger operate the back. The sticks walk relative to the camera, the triggers jump and make BOY eat (left trigger only... thank god). The game is, ultimately, very much like Katamari. You stretch BOY by moving the front half away from the back half, eventually you reach a maximum length and need to eat things to grow further. The longer BOY gets, the larger the objects he can consume.



The real depth of Noby Noby Boy comes from the nebulous goal of stretching. Past a certain length, you cannot stretch BOY simply by walking in opposite directions, for the lack of space or strength. You need to wrap around, over and through objects to get the leverage. These objects have different weights and may or may not be secured to the surreal floating acre of ground BOY and friends inhabit. I'm still investigating BOY's gastrointestinal capacity and what makes everything he's eaten explode out of his ass, but I do know this assplosion happens on contact with the five sides of the ground not considered top, or with significant impact against the toroid clouds floating over the cuboid planet. There is some secret, clearly, with the top length on the leader board being in hundreds of thousands of meters when I looked at GIRL, which is a personified leader board as well as the source of a collective goal. GIRL grows to the sum length of all the BOYs, reaching toward other planets. I learned yesterday that we've reached the moon.



There's a chance that my expectations of spending five bones on a nothing-fluff game that I'd use to kill a few minutes from time to time has colored my perception of Noby Noby Boy, making me more impressed with it than someone expecting a free form, almost self imposed, puzzle game where the goal is whatever I want it to be and the puzzle ends when I get tired of working on it. I suspect that is why it eats time as it does: there isn't a finish line where the game stops; it goes on until you say you're done. It's strangely refreshing to have a complex puzzle with no right or wrong answers, that's been "solved" whenever I'm satasfied with the result and can say "Yeah. I'll send that in." and feel some measure of pride in my Goldbergian, noodle-being stretching.

Noby Noby Boy is $4.99 well spent, and you can always pick it up along with Savage Moon if that $0.01 left in your wallet will burn a hole in your sanity.

Space Squirrel out of 10