POSTED 18/9/14


MURASAKI BABY

Ovosonico/Sony

Baby don’t cry. Baby don’t cry...

Please, don’t. We’re trying, we really are.

But Baby will cry. She’s lost in a world of her nightmares and, like every toddler of very few years, wants her mummy. It’s up to whoever’s Vita-wielding to hold her hand and reunite mother and daughter. No pressure!

Naturally there is pressure, and we’ll get to that. But first some descriptive setup stuff, for we’re led to believe that people like such things.

Murasaki Baby bears the name of a fictional Japanese heroine, but looks akin to the aftermath of a collision of the brains of Berkeley Breathed and Tim Burton (complete with forehead mouth). Her icky dream world’s populated with the usual things we imagine the bonces of babes to be bathing in – monsters, weird melanges of everyday stuff and wild hairdos. Actually, the latter may just be us... It’s all done in an animated pencil-drawn style, with splashes of colour beyond Baby’s purple heart-shaped balloon woobie.

Let this pop and you’ll have one distraught little’un on your hands, and you’ll be catapulted to an often way-back checkpoint to wrong, do it again. We're talking platform puzzler with Ico and Limbo shades, whereby in typical kiddie fashion you treasure your balloon while gleefully bursting those of others you encounter. Still, this yields various rear touchpad abilities. Swipe to grey, turn your balloon to rock to avoid windy gales. Go purple and distract monsters with TV... and so on.

You’ll eventually juggle all manner of swipes, flips and frontal screen finger plops to avoid stressing out Baby. You, however, will increasingly become the personification of stress. Just like real parenting!

While Murasaki Baby’s an emotional rollercoaster that’s often quite beautiful and frequently heart-tugging, technical frustrations abound – like requiring more fingers and hands than the average human possesses for assorted contortions.

Bugger parenthood, we’re going iguana. Ah, Jub-Jub!

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