It's snowing.

Bad.

I haven't left the house in about a week. There's still a severe winter storm warning, and I'm really hoping that I can get out tomorrow.

But, the utilities have been on the entire time, the kitchen is stocked, and I have been sitting in my warm house with my fully belly, getting things done that need doing around the house, and I've been going back through my back catalogue of games. Everything is still in boxes, so I've been playing on an emulator, which will become important at a later point in this review. I'm going to rename this section review/analysis, because a lot of these are pretty long winded and contain what could be called media analysis.

Fun fact about me! Despite all my fancy schooling, or perhaps because of it, I'm still broke as shit. I have a lot of feelings about this, but I bring it up because I do not own a Switch 2. I can't afford it. But I have heard tale that this game is available on the Switch 2, so that would be an option.

This game came out in 2005, which means I've had it sitting around for 21 years and never played it. It essentially functioned as a collector's item, on a shelf, collecting dust. But, with the snowstorm, combined with the broke-assery, I've decided to go back and play games that I've been meaning to play for the past 30 years or so.

I am a fool to have left this on the shelf. This is one of my favorite platformers, I think I'm going to say "of all time". This game is amazing. I honestly have no complaints with it at all, which is rare. Even wonderful games tend to have downsides, but this one I think I never found myself actively disliking. That doesn't mean that some things couldn't be done better, it just means that I found nothing worth bitching about.

Like all my reviews, this will contain spoilers, because I've come to realize that my writing tends to me more analysis than review anyway.

First of all, the art direction on this game is absolutely gorgeous. I love these environments, I love these character models, I love these objects, I love this whole vibe. This game is gorgeous. I've said it before and I'll say it again: The push for realism at all costs ruins video games. They are supposed to be art. And this is art. That is why it looks good in 2026 when it was made in 2005.

I really love these character models. I can't get enough of them.

I would describe Chibi-Robo as a surrealist platformer. I love surrealism, but as I've aged, I've had difficulty with platforming, due to my bad wrists and the degradation of fine motor skills and reflex time that naturally comes with age. I've said before that I believe that all games should come with differing difficulty modes to account for different player ability, and sadly, this is one that does not.

But, I didn't have too much trouble with it, to be honest. There were a few times where I felt like I knew what I had to do, or where I simply failed at a platforming task, but overall, the difficulty level was fine, the controls were intuitive, and the timing was overall good. I would actually compare the gameplay to the early Tomb Raider games, which I also love. The levels are laid out expertly to where you get an intuitive feel for the house and the objects within it, how it's going to be laid out, and your own abilities. The gameplay is solid.

And, something I really like, is that gameplay elements are blended with the story and art design to create a seamless environment, allowing for greater suspension of disbelief. As a robot, your internal battery will run down, and you have to recharge at wall outlets. This is also how you save your gameplay. After recharging, you're asked if you would like to save. There are a lot of small things like that that make for an immersive experience, and lead me well into fan theories.

This game has a deceptively compelling story that unfolds as you play and get more lore. Because it is so immersive, you accept things without explanation, such as the toys being alive and playing by Toy Story rules, because it is so easy to believe that these are just the rules of the universe you're playing in. So when you start the game as a birthday gift for a child, it makes perfect sense that you would be a companion and housekeeping robot.

There are problems right from the start; the mother believes that you are a very expensive gift and that the family cannot afford you, hinting at their money troubles, but during the early parts of the game, it's generally a happy, surreal experience. The day of the party you have time to just play around and get used to the wonderful controls, and that night (introducing you to the day and night cycle) you can wander the house. This first night, you will meet two of the living toys, which do not appear to live during the day, but later you will learn that they go dormant around humans.

The first I met was Sophie, and she scared the living shit out of me. I have a bug phobia anyway, I'm brand new to the game, and this giant caterpillar is just out here in the darkness in an unfamiliar environment. But that's my own bug racism because she's a perfectly nice lady with an unrequited love for an action figure of Drake Redcrest, an in-universe television show. She's a dog toy. And pretty much her entire story arch revolves around her crush on Drake, and he never returns her affection, and she's honestly just a crazy stalker, but not in a violent way and she's very kind to me so I'm not going to say anything to her.

But, she was my introduction to the concept of the living toys, and, as previously stated, I just accepted it as normal within the universe of Chibi-Robo. The concept didn't phase me at all.

Your primary goal is to clean up the house, which is nasty, with mud and garbage everywhere. You speak to the mom pretty early on, and she is upset about the nastiness of her house, but even more upset about the fact that her husband lost his, apparently very well-paying job, and the family is burning through money fast. So you use a toothbrush you find under the couch to clean up all the filth, which rewards you with happy points, which you use to upgrade your battery, allowing you to go for longer periods of time without having to charge.

These happy points are a core aspect of gameplay. The overall goal is to gather more of them than any other chibi-robo on the market, which is tracked through the manufacture's online database in a terminal within the chibi-house, the home base of the chibi-robo. It is from this terminal that you also access the company store to buy upgrades for yourself, such as a gun and battery packs, as well as completely random shit that it doesn't seem like an electronics manufacturer would make, like flower seeds.

The mother is extremely upset about the money issues. She's trying desperately to keep the family afloat on their scant savings (but never considers getting a job herself for some reason). Every time you talk to her she's bitching about money, and about how lazy her husband is, and she makes him sleep on the couch, which you can see him doing during the night.

The dad is a huge nerd who is obsessed with the Drake Redcrest show; he is actually the owner of the action figure, not the child, Jenny. Though Jenny does have a good number of her own toys and I like most of them. But he is legitimately not job seeking, and he is aware of the money issues, and he does lay around all day watching TV, so overall I don't know who's in the right here.

The size and opulence of the home uses environmental storytelling to tell the player that this family is having money troubles now, but were rich when they bought the home. The rooms are huge and decorated in a maximalist, almost Rococo style, with giant portraits and hanging gardens, etc. No bathroom though, which bothered me.

Parts of the house unlock for you as you complete quests and solve puzzles. It actually took me forever to get past the Free Rangers the first time you have to do that, and then I was very scared of them for far longer than I needed to be, because apparently you gain their trust and respect just by getting past them, however I didn't know that and thought that they would just shoot me on sight.

Getting past the Free Rangers allows you access to the basement, where the first sign that something is terribly wrong waits to meet you. A giant robot lies, half disassembled in the corner, apparently forgotten about and left to rot. This is obviously from the same manufacturer as the player, and the sight of it stirs up many questions. What is it? Who is it? Why was it abandoned down here?

Fortunately, a wooden pirate named Captain Plankbeard was once good friends with this robot, who is named Giga-Robo, and who is, in fact, from the same manufacturer as Chibi-Robo. I don't remember how you learn this lore, but the Giga-Robo line was discontinued and recalled, because it single-handedly caused an energy crisis. When you decide to recharge his battery and repair him, doing so costs $10,000, which you do and pay in secret inside the chibi-house, because you don't want the Sanderson's out $10K for one charge. And, you don't know how long that will last. Chibi-Robo's non-upgraded battery lasts less than 200 steps.

I got this money ridiculously easily by cheating a charlatan in the basement. There exists what I believe to be a tea pot, though exactly what he is is never directly stated, who is cheating people out of money in the basement with a game of chance dependent upon whether or not he decides to open his own eye. As ridiculous as this is, it is apparently a real game of chance in the game's code, so you can win it. So, because I was playing on an emulator, what I did was create a save state right when he asks you to choose, and then reload it if I as wrong. In this way I got the money to recharge giga-robo in one session or cheating this guy out of money.

I really don't want to spoil the story too much, I've decided, because it's so good and unfolds so well, and also because it's so buckwild it would honestly be difficult to tell. You need to experience this game. Every element of this game is a work of art, and the story is amazing. So I'm actually going to end this review here and go into my fan theories, a section I may come back to in the future. Do not read further if you do not want spoilers.

Citrusoft Robotics Inc. stole technology from the aliens. Giga-Robo, Chibi-Robo, and everything else is based on alien technology. There is absolutely no reason that they would be selling a translator for the alien language if this was not the case. But, I believe that they stole this technology long before Giga stopped the spaceship crash. I believe that the entire line of Giga-robos were developed based on this alien technology, and that is why they did not know how much power they would consume. The aliens have perpetual energy generators, they went back to their homeworld to get one for Giga. Everything they have probably uses an obscene amount of energy, but they don't care, because they don't need to ration energy in any way. That's why they were so easily able to upgrade Giga.

The Citrusoft brand inanimate objects are also the only inanimate objects outside the house to have personalities to the point that they have genuine free will. We know Giga had that before they saved the aliens. And we know that the toys and teapots and whatever the hell that guy with the electrical plug for head is, have that kind of free will because the aliens gave it to them. The aliens actually called them souls and it looked like a ball of light, so it's untelling what that actually is, but it gives personalities to inanimate objects and imbues them with life, similar to the powder of life from the Oz series.

And I believe that Mr. Sanderson did not know that.

I believe that he programed the spydorz with normal-ass human AI, fully intending for them to be companion bots like Chibi-Robo. When he found out that they were being used as weapons, he quit. He left his job over ethics, and the reason he couldn't get another one was because the spydorz went rogue and started attacking people, so no one would hire him with his name down as the lead on that project. I believe Citrusoft changed his code before launch and replaced or upgraded it with the alien technology. I believe that Mr. Sanderson originally created security bots, probably with cameras and weapons like the chibi-blaster. He likely did create the chibi-blaster because he had the schematics to upgrade it, likely when chibi-robos were in the beginning stages, because you get that upgrade schematic from 10 years in the past. So the psydorz were likely a companion to chibi-robo like the other utility bots, which Chibi Robo could use like cameras to see parts of the house he wasn't in. But, with the robot AI, if they were to be used for security, the whole attacking people and building themselves up by hijacking other technology, like whole refrigerators and shit, was probably that alien tech that gave them personalities.