Noby Noby Boy

I Hated Katamari Damacy

Poured yourself a nice pint of haterade then? Got your rage filled comment ready to go?

Before you do decide to hate BOY and GIRL, the first thing to consider is that Noby Noby Boy isn’t another Katamari game. It even makes the point explicitly in the tutorial, letting you know ‘there’s no rolling involved.’ At first glance, it will definitely remind onlookers of Katamari, but players less so.

The gameplay is far more free-form in Noby Noby than it ever was in Katamari. Whereas Katamari had levels with definable goals, Noby Noby Boy dispenses with that entirely. There’s no timer, there’s no selection of blacked out locations that you need to unlock in order to reach. You can do whatever you feel like.

Secondly, one of the main criticisms of Katamari was its cute, crazy style. It was defiantly unserious. Noby Noby Boy isn’t exactly Silent Hill and it's still cartoony and naïve visually, but it does dispense with the cast of comedy characters Katamari had. Once the tutorial is over, none of the characters really has any dialogue, and there’s no pretence of a plot to follow.


The lack of goals, levels and dialogue means that the game’s central mechanic is more clearly exposed than ever, and you might be surprised that the main themes of Noby Noby Boy are destruction and consumption. You could kindly refer to it as pure play, or interaction with an environment, but it’s destruction nonetheless.

You can eat people and animals, knock trees over and hurl houses around. When BOY has finished exploring a level, everything is all over the place. There’s no dust, no smoke and no fire, that’s true, but the physics in the game means you can really have fun visiting creative chaos on the randomly generated levels, flinging people into the clouds.


Finally, unlike Katamari, the creators aren’t changing full price for the game. Far from it; Noby Noby Boy is a mere £3.19 in the UK ($4.99 in the US).

One of the most enticing promises of game download services is that, freed from the need to shoulder the expenses of retail production, it would enable a wider variety of games to be made. Whatever else you might think of Noby Noby Boy, it’s impossible to deny it’s a bold, interesting experiment, and it’s been priced as such. Costing not much more than a single pint of beer, it’s worth picking Noby Noby Boy up just to try it.

You might be surprised how much you'll like it if you can just get past the fiddly camera controls and relentlessly twee (and awfully repeitive) music that fills every second of the game.