The PS3 exclusive is set for an “early 2009” release in PAL regions, where it will land on the Playstation Store at a surprisingly low price of €3.99.
Keita Takahashi, the famed Katamari Damacy developer, has hitherto remained quiet and cryptic about how the game will actually play. His keynote at the Game City conference last year featured a tech demo where the game’s central character (a brightly-coloured worm-like being called BOY) could stretch its abdomen and herd farmyard animals by encircling them. This was strictly a concept demo, however. The demo featured no guidelines or goals.
Months later at the 2008 Tokyo Game Show, Namco Bandai presented a thoroughly contrasting video of the game, where BOY was now ‘driving’ across an abstract 2D driving grid of vividly-coloured blocks. Though Takahashi’s idiosyncratic signature was written across the footage, the video confused onlookers even more about how the game would actually play,
The latest release suggests that the main concept of the game will, in fact, be similar to the Game City demo, where BOY can “stretch and interact with a variety of objects and characters” in which the press release calls “an all new gaming experience”. The game’s narrative, meanwhile, is unmistakeable: “GIRL, who lives in space will grow as BOY stretches, will continue to grow and connect to the planets in the Solar System with the help of all the BOYS in the world!”
However the game actually plays out, players can record gameplay movies and upload them to YouTube, much like in PixelJunk Eden.
A US release was not announced in the release, Edge has contacted Namco Bandai for clarification.