GameCube cult classic Chibi-Robo! is getting a revival. Ex-staff from Chibi-Robo! developer Skip announced a new studio on Friday to make a spiritual successor called koROBO that looks very much like its predecessor — down to its premise. But there are some big promised changes.
In a Nintendo Everything exclusive, the new company, Tiny Wonder Studio, announced upcoming Kickstarter and Campfire campaigns to raise money for the development. It’s set to launch on July 22, and will run for around a month. You can sign up for notifications on the Kickstarter page for when it goes live.
Tiny Wonder said koROBO very much takes “a ton of Chibi-Robo inspiration.” It’s about a boy named Tom who receives a tiny robot as a gift, and the effect it has on the family. He’ll do tasks around the house, help Tom with his homework, and play games. It gets a little bigger than the original game by allowing the robot to interact with the neighbors in Tom’s apartment building and meet other little guys.
This is basically the premise of the original Chibi-Robo! from 2005, which was a platformer for the GameCube that involved navigating a tiny robot around a house to do tasks for the family with its battery-powered backside. It was a decent hit with players at launch, but subsequent games in the series were not. After 2015’s Chibi Robo! Zip Lash for the Nintendo 3DS failed on almost every metric, the series was abandoned.
Like the first game, koROBO will have a battery mechanic where the robot needs to be charged. In the new title, though, he can do so with sunlight thanks to a solar modification.
Another big change comes with how koROBO can upgrade his abilities. It starts out fairly normal, with the ability to glide around, but you’ll eventually unlock time travel. It’s unclear how this will be used, but we can assume it’s related to the world in which the game takes place, which is suffering through an energy crisis and could use a hero like koROBO.
