Ah, Noby Noby Boy, where to begin. A basic gameplay session will probably consist of you controlling the titular BOY, a worm-like creature with four legs, navigating your way around a square slice of earth suspended in a void of nothingness. Other inhabitants of the land include giant spinning tops, ballerinas, curious cows, banana cars and bubble-emitting robots, amongst others.

As you control both the front and back end of BOY, it is your job to stretch yourself out as far as possible, walking in opposite directions to do so, eating, and then pooping out unscathed, the inhabitants of the world to grow bigger as you deem necessary. Occasionally, one of the inhabitants will ride on your back. Welcome to the world of Noby Noby Boy.

Let’s start again, this time with a bit of chronology. Noby Noby Boy is the latest game to escape the mind of Keita Takahashi, a game designer at Namco who professes not to play games, but instead become inspired by trailers and footage from games. He is constantly threatening to leave the world of game development to begin a career in designing playgrounds for children, but ever since he designed and released Katamari Damacy in 2004, has not done so. From such an eccentric person, we could only ever expect to play games as unique and quirky as Katamari Damacy.

Quirky would also be a good descriptor for Noby Noby Boy, a game with no real aim other than to stretch out your worm-like body and grow larger by eating anything and everything you can find in the world. You can easily amuse yourself in this world as you discover that certain objects that you eat can be combined within your stomach, and pooped out as an amalgamation of two different entities.

To this end, you can create fish-spacemen, cow-people, and radish-men. While these combinations are indeed a little weird, they somehow fit seamlessly into the world of rogue tractors and anthropomorphic moons.

While Noby Noby Boy is graphically spare, employing simple shades of colour for textures and very basic animation and models to represent in-game items, the sheer amount of movement and diversity of objects makes up for this supposed short-coming, providing more than enough ‘eye-candy’ to keep you interested. This visual style also lends itself to the playground atmosphere that Noby Noby Boy encourages, allowing players to set their own goals and accomplishments in the game during a given play session.

Do you want to try and eat all of the objects in the world? Fly into the air and connect all of the doughnut-shaped clouds together with your body? Get ten inhabitants to ride on your back? It’s up to you.

It’s only a little while into playing the game that you realise, while you’re largely left to your own devices, there is indeed a greater purpose to your seemingly inane playtime – whenever you stretch BOY’s body, you are contributing to the total length of GIRL, a space-faring character that is trying to travel through the cosmos with the help of every player of Noby Noby Boy, worldwide.

If your PS3 is connected online, you’re able to report your BOY’s length to the Sun (another character) who in turn reports your length to GIRL, who, after eating a few hearts representing your length and accompanied by a two-frame animation of a squirrel, grows the requisite length, travelling that much further on her journey through the solar system and beyond. GIRL has recently reached the Moon and is well on her way to Mars, all thanks to the help of almost 30 000 Noby Noby Boy players around the world.

While not without its problems - a painful, SixAxis controlled camera system included - Noby Noby Boy immediately strikes one as a grand experiment, a physics demonstration that grew into something not wholly understood by the developers, but injected with enough personality and quirky humour to be able to stand on its own. Noby Noby Boy, available now on the PlayStation Store, is extremely inexpensive, and has enough to do, and enough of a future charter, to justify the cost of experiencing one of the most bizarre commercial games to be released since, well, Katamari Damacy.

Pros: Wonderfully quirky humour; intriguing meta-game; great for a few minutes of playground playtime; fitting music and sound effects

Cons: Camera system; menu navigation; initial feeling of being gypped

Purchase: