Indie | A Boy and his Blueberry

But while the thematic approaches, loosely defined genres and explorable axes of these two games may differ, a couple of their central design features overlap.

Structurally, both pull the proverbial carpet from underneath you. In both games it’s possible to ignore the vague objectives and play. Not in the videogame sense, it must be understood. Just play. Noby Noby Boy is undoubtedly more ambitious in this respect with its style lending it to more organic and freeform play, but Blueberry Garden is no slouch. Outside the one goal of assembling a large pile of objects, there’s little resembling an orthodox structure, though moment-to-moment objectives can be formed with progression in mind. In other words, Noby Noby Boy eradicates all we expect from advancement in a game, but Blueberry Garden applies this in a more considered string of aims linking back to the overarching narrative at hand. Some areas in the latter cannot be accessed unless a few boxes have been ticked, but it’s easy to slip in and out of sandbox play. Just like chemistry is applied physics and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is applied LittleBigPlanet, Blueberry Garden – entirely by accident – stakes a claim to the new ground explored by Noby Noby Boy and builds something resembling what we’d expect from a platform game with its recent discoveries intact.

Both games are also about consumption. Their themes are incredibly distinct except, oddly enough, the very one that arguably defines them. Noby Noby Boy is preoccupied – like its natural forebear Katamari – with taking things. In this case, it’s not a sticky ball, but a snake-like creature that is built to eat. As he grows, he gobbles down more and more, eventually expelling it from his backside to make room for further treats. Trees, unicycles, pigs, children, cushions, tennis balls, blobs of colour, aubergines, giant toy robots – a random assortment of items to chomp down, and if Boy gets stuffed, his physics are affected accordingly. Blueberry Garden is again the distillation of these concepts in practice within more familiar boundaries. The player character can eat fruit and vegetables that fall from trees, and these have varying consequences. The turnip-like foodstuff shifts the landscape ever so slightly, the pine cones expel their seeds to the wind and the titular blueberries allow the protagonist to fly further. It’s a consensus between the approach Boy takes and games’ power-up systems that is, again, open to experimentation. Indeed, many pickups serve no apparent purpose; they’re just there to play with.

//A world apart
The final significant hallmark the two share is their redefinition of the sandbox. Noby Noby Boy is no Crackdown or Saints Row. Its entire play area is a square block; there are no missions, side-missions or side-side-missions; Boy can’t kill; it’s not chaotic in the same sense; there are no orbs or hidden packages; it refuses to concern itself with being cool. Blueberry Garden presents its own sandbox in a similar way, in that the world is there for the player to mess about with in a way that is poles apart from other open worlds. It’s fairly condensed, but once more it takes a consensual route. It’s more Metroid-with-randomness than populous creative playground, with most events prescribed by the creator in some way. The garden blurs the lines between play for play’s sake and object-hunting in a non-linear environment, with this final piece in the puzzle showing the comparisons with Noby Noby Boy are intrinsically linked as part of the experience at large.

There’s a theme developing here. It’s that Blueberry Garden is a logical halfway point between Noby Noby Boy’s hereditary traits – or lack thereof – and the unyielding hardcore traditionalism evidenced in today’s online gaming community. If the PSN release were the vital ingredient in the mixture, Svedäng’s project is the resulting tasty cake.

While writing this article I realised that Remo wasn’t wrong. But neither was he right, and the crossover between the two is subtle but important. Revelatory breakthroughs in this industry often slip by unnoticed. Noby Noby Boy and Blueberry Garden are quietly doing their own thing while the heavyweight triple-A titles promise bigger environments, more weapons and uncanny visual fidelity. Sadly, it remains the latter that passes for evolution in an industry that forever pretends it’s in chronic need of a shake up, leaving its true innovators to discretely push the medium forward to little fanfare.

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