Early Impressions: Your dreams of being sold into metallic servitude are about to be realized.
While companies labor to create robots with artificial intelligence smart enough to endear themselves to their owners, Skip, Ltd. and Nintendo have instead decided to put you in control of a robot trying to please its AI owners. The game, Chibi-Robo, is already turning heads in Japan and is now gearing up for a holiday release in the west. A careful blend of exploration, platforming, and puzzle solving, Chibi-Robo looks to embody the quirky charm and carefree “fun first” attitude that makes the GameCube’s library so unique and irresistible.
You play the title role: a household robot no more than a few inches tall. As a birthday gift to Jenny, a young girl who believes that she is a frog, your task is simple: make the lives of your human owners more pleasant. While not exciting on paper, Chibi-Robo hopes to tap into that certain aimless-yet-addictive brand of fun that lets the player take in a game at their own speed while never feeling lost or unchallenged.
Starting off simply by having the player give Jenny a flower to wish her a happy birthday, Chibi-Robo slowly broadens its scope both in available missions and areas to explore. Soon, the player will be helping the home owners with the garden, keeping the house tidy, and generally being a robotic Suzy-Q. The trick to finishing these tasks (and the fun of Chibi-Robo) is figuring out what you should do and then how to go about doing it.
Life isn't easy when you’re less than a foot tall. When the kitchen counter is an imposing fixture in your life, it is time to rely on your wits, agility, and thank the stars that you are upgradeable. Only by making clever use of your surroundings, other toys and droids in the house, and at the same time increasing your own abilities through a system of add-ons, can you hope to bring a smile to your owners’ lips. Thankfully, the game’s diverse environments, and upgrades such as a helicopter-like parachute and a projectile “weapon” (toy army men are not so benign in Chibi-Robo’s reality), should make conquering your environment consistently fun and engaging.
So, what should we be expecting from this genre-defying title come November? With the purchasing of power ups, traversing around seemingly insurmountable household objects, and occasionally plugging into the nearest power socket to keep your metallic frame chugging, Chibi-Robo has all the pinnings of a platformer with a robotic twist. However, the largely free-form gameplay, a day and night cycle that changes the world around you, NPC interactions, and a good deal of brainteasers all come together to make Chibi-Robo more of a robotic adventure/puzzler with a platforming twist.
