Murasaki Baby review: Wild world

This strange little PlayStation Vita game is the debut of Ovosonico, a developer headed by Massimo Guarini of Killer7 and Shadows of the Damned fame. It’s a pedigree that practically demands oddity at every turn, and Murasaki Baby doesn’t disappoint. The game’s world thrives on the imagination and fears of the young, where the unusual becomes terrifying.

Muraski Baby is both a complicated escort mission and a visually appealing exploration of how the Vita’s touch capabilities can make for fun puzzles. But its intriguing concept is held back by its own childlike simplicity.

In Muraski Baby, my goal was to guide a frightened little girl with an upside-down face and wisps of curly hair through a world of bizarre obstacles. I did this by taking her hand and guiding her along, literally. I could only prod Baby to move with the Vita’s touch screen, tugging her hand and pulling with my finger or swiping to convince her to jump.

Adapting to Murasaki Baby’s controls is made easy by its intuitive design. Yanking on Baby’s arm too fast will cause her to trip forward or tumble to the ground, but these moments were always matched by my own gut response — usually a moment of "whoops, I’ve pulled too hard." Moving in a hurry was more difficult for me, as Baby’s slim, black arm would sometimes seem to fade into the game’s darker backgrounds. Just like with a real child, I found myself grasping for her hand impatiently and with frustration as danger bore down on us.

Puzzles, too, fell on the simple side. The trickiest instances involved me leading Baby while keeping her balloon protected, either by setting the Vita in my lap and using both hands or navigating with a thumb and forefinger. Occasionally Baby’s balloon will come into play in these puzzles, whether by acting as an anchor or a key, but it remained equally easy to manipulate; nothing is ever out of reach, whether in a mental or physical capacity.

The most taxing puzzles, and Murasaki Baby’s strongest offerings, involve swapping backgrounds. As I progressed through each level, I would find different colored balloons to burst. With each pop, I’d gain the power to use the Vita’s back touchscreen to pull the background away and replace it with one of a dominant color — orange, blue, green and so forth.

But while these puzzles are satisfying when layered, they often fail to require any real thought. The way forward was usually easy enough to figure out with one screen, and guiding Baby calls for more patience than intelligence. Even in the game’s most difficult moments — for me, chasing down a balloon thief while attempting to keep the balloon safe from harm — I found that a single try or two was usually sufficient to move on.

Murasaki Baby gave me handfuls of interesting mechanics to play with, but it rarely put them to good use. It’s a short experience — only a few hours, feasibly completable in one sitting. That brief time in this world wasn't enough to properly utilize all of the powers I was given access to. Cool abilities were introduced and then used only a few times for specific scenarios. With each new world, I waited for the game to challenge me or force me to test my limits by using those skills creatively — and I found myself disappointed.