It executes its heartfelt intentions with a confident nonchalance, wondering why other games need to scream when a careful whisper will do. Murasaki Baby doesn’t know (or care) about the universal drag of escort missions, the recent abandonment of proper Vita software, or that most will mistake its influence for Tim Burton and not Edward Gorey. As an empathetic experience and an enjoyable game, Murasaki Baby is as honest and true as any of its peers.
It’s difficult to take your eyes off of Murasaki Baby’s visual splendor. Stuck somewhere between a fuzzy monochromatic sketchbook and the more surreal works of Gorey, its characters and settings are equal parts monstrous and adorable. The game plays slow, but animates at an incredibly fast clip. Baby, the titular character, pulls a range of emotion from a well of relatable expressions. Whether she’s briefly dangling her toes as she gets out of bed or taking the time to dust herself off after a fall, the player isn’t left wanting for lovable, identifiable sentiment.
Videogames are great at telling people they should care about something, but usually come up short when combining interactivity with evocative feelings. Fostering a relationship between two characters, as demonstrated by Ico and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, is best executed when those two characters are intended to work together. Murasaki Baby takes this approach and spins it on its heels, forcing the player into the role of the literal hand-holding. Primarily a touchscreen game, you don’t necessarily play as Baby as much as you physically take her hand and guide her to safety and resolution.
There’s been a great amount of care taken to express the frailty and delicacy of Baby. Pull her hand away too fast and she’ll get excited and fall over. Most anything that moderately amuses her generates an overzealous sentiment of pure excitement. Baby is a little kid in its most idealized form; she’s fascinated by and subsequently scared of almost everything. The development team at Ovosonico outlines Baby with enough unique animation and vivacious audio cues to make her a cheerfully sympathetic character. This may seem like an odd contrast in regard to Baby’s overtly frightening appearance, but it works in the context of Murasaki Baby as a vector to express universal human dilemmas. The art isn’t supposed to be obscene or garish, but rather stylized interpretations of universal emotions.
Murasaki Baby may look like it carries all the tedium and annoyance of an escort mission, but it physically plays with higher ambition. Outright defense isn’t out of the question, but instances of danger are typically applied to the puzzle at hand. Through each objective level, the player gains the ability to shift the background and alter the effect of tapping the rear-touchscreen. In the first level, shifting to the red-painted land full of jack-in-the-boxes scares away her aggressors (and also terrifies Baby). Likewise, switching to the dreary blue backdrop and touching the rear touchpad makes it rain, which is useful for filling up a lake to sail a boat. Switching to the orange background brings up a windmill, itself a proper asset for solving some object-based puzzles.
After the first level, I though Murasaki Baby was going to play like a 2D version of Quantum Conundrum. It was going to introduce a basic set of properties in its flexible backgrounds, and then spin them around in progressively challenging puzzles. This is exactly what it did – but only for the first level. Each of Murasaki Baby’s four levels introduces a series of contextually dependent backgrounds, each of which drastically alter the tools the player has at their disposal. Murasaki Baby repeatedly throws away all of its toys because it’s sure you’ll like the new ones even better.
The relationship between a level’s backgrounds and its rotating cast of characters are endemic to Murasaki Baby’s critical message. Each level introduces a new foil for Baby, along with an opportunity to solve their specific problems. In both cases, Baby and the character are conquering a specific fear. This could have played out with the simplest of metaphors and still relayed an effective message, but Murasaki Baby goes a few layers deeper when it tries relating its central conceit. Neither text nor dialogue are a part of the game, opting instead for direct connections in the form of loneliness, fear, alienation, and the general longing for loving relationship. These emotions are expressed through the overzealous actions of Murasaki Baby’s characters, and conquered through the actions of the player. Solving puzzles and rotating through backgrounds progresses the narrative of both Baby and her current rival/friend. You’re objectively helping Baby, but it always has a way of wrapping back around and helping out an unlikely friend.
Complaints may form when you realize Murasaki Baby’s doesn’t exactly push the limits of its gameplay style. Taking damage and losing grasp of Baby’s balloon functions sort of like the drifting Baby Mario in Yoshi’s Island, but rarely to the point where it’s an actual threat. Likewise, chase sequences or challenges like protecting the balloon from falling teeth with an umbrella require some skill multi-touch finger antics, but are more about limber dexterity than actual difficulty. Murasaki Baby’s puzzles really only get going in the last chapter and close up shop right when it gets tricky. Removed from their context, levels feel like vignettes adapted to relatively basic mechanics. Murasaki Baby feels like a game designed to be played and absorbed rather than a test of will for your brain or reflexes to overcome.
Putting narrative above challenge must have been a tough decision, but it’s one that Ovosonico made with engaging confidence. Murasaki Baby doesn’t have any menus or overt exposition. It doesn’t even have a pause option. The relative ease of its flow is a deliberate decision to trust the player to march onward. Complexity doesn’t arrive from a safe navigation from A to B, but rather putting enough pieces together to interpret the severity of a tragic narrative. Murasaki Baby won’t necessarily test your reflexes or your brain with the depth and precision of other games in more evident genres, but its assemblage of disparate genres wields its own special power. Whether it’s through Baby’s endearing conduct or the raw anxiety bleeding from those she encounters, it’s hard for Murasaki Baby not to make some sort of meaningful connection with the player.
I don’t know why Ovosonico chose to make their game for the PlayStation Vita, but can’t say the performance is regrettable. Having a decent PC and a cornucopia of consoles, I haven’t gotten much use out of the Vita’s library in 2014. It’s through selfish subjectivity that I welcomed a chance to play something, anything original on the platform before the year drew to a close, but Murasaki Baby fills the gap nicely. The art pops on the OLED screen, and the various gimmicks associated with the hardware – liberal use of the rear touchpad, puzzles involving turning the device upside-down, tricky touch mechanics – feel right at home in my hands. Other than disappointing buggy sequence, Murasaki Baby makes no use of the analog sticks, so I suppose nothing would prevent an appearance on myriad of other devices, but it was nice, if just for now, for the Vita to point to a shining star to call its own.
