There’s a new open-world Kirby game coming and this one is hiding some big secrets. When the pink blob sees a crack in the sky and smashes it wide open to reveal “a world beyond,” it’s a neat reveal that also happens to be a perfect, if accidental, allusion to The Truman Show. The two shall forevermore be inextricably linked. The internet is making sure of that.
For anyone born after the ’90s and who hasn’t gone back and watched an all-time classic, The Truman Show starred Jim Carrey as a guy tricked into living his life on a giant soundstage, completely unaware that he’s been recorded for a reality TV show since birth. Everyone is in on the exploitative gag except him, which eventually begins to unravel in ways both humorous and exceedingly grim. It’s an exceptional time capsule of turn-of-the-century paranoia about consumerism, endless surveillance, and the entertainment industrial complex that has only proven more prescient with time.
So naturally it’s the first thing some peoples’ minds went to when Kirby discovered his perceived world is also just a facade keeping the truth hidden from him:
Why didnt Truman just do this? Is he stupid? pic.twitter.com/LKzkrGOjh4
— Asriel/Wooffle (@WooffleDee) September 9, 2026
They put Kirby in the Truman show pic.twitter.com/y06tfl8CBH
— Gazun 💮 (@Gazungamer) September 9, 2026
Kirby and the World Beyond (2027) pic.twitter.com/hIlqxW3bvu
— brodie / knox (@brodiecantskate) September 9, 2026
Kirby and the World Beyond looks a lot less cynical, but who knows? Maybe some nefarious villain is also trying to keep Kirby trapped in a prison of illusion for its own ends in the upcoming Switch 2 game. The world beyond Kirby’s looks surprisingly similar to the one he’s already living in. It could be a great premise for Nintendo to play with in terms of hiding secrets and playing with people’s expectations of conventional open-world exploration and discovery.
At the very least, the trailer gave us, for just a moment, one of the year’s most unexpected cross-overs in pop culture. If you, like me, now really want to go watch The Truman Show, you’re in luck. It’s streaming for free on Pluto TV.