#wattam

After directing the first two Katamari games and the experimental and toyetic Noby Noby Boy at Namco, Keita Takahashi went solo and has continued creating odd, playful games at various places. Despite a long, troubled development Wattam (which a trophy description informs me is a portmanteau of the Japanese word wa (ring) and the Tamil word vattam (circle)) continues that legacy.

Just like in Katamari Damacy, a cosmically destructive event has occurred, although the details are trickled out gradually. The result is a featureless plane of clouds, with a square platform all that remains of the world before, inhabited by the Mayor. This green cuboid gentleman is your player character, and (in a premise reminiscent of the webcomic 1/0) he has to recreate the objects and concepts that used to make up ordinary life from first principles, each one personified as a cutesy character with arms, legs, and a face. The Mayor can jump, climb, hold hands with other characters, and pick up things, but he also has a magic (non-damaging) bomb under his hat.

I would describe the experience as closest to an adventure game, accessible to kids for the most part. The next objective or event is handed to you and you play around with the mechanics to "welcome back" characters such as rocks, trees, body parts, toilet, rubber duck, chair, etc. At milestones a larger object appears, serving as a platform which can then move you between season-themed islands in the sky. Oh and did I mention that each and every object/character is playable and you can swap between them at any time?

While there's a lot to explain, the gameplay tries to keep it simple, although the physics simulation and utter chaos of countless characters stumbling around and interacting can make the necessary actions (stacking, forming a circle holding hands, getting the mouth to catch food objects and poop them out, etc.) difficult. Late in the game you also have all your little folks split between four islands, and working to find specific ones and bring them between islands can get tedious. There is a co-op mode where two players can help manage the chaos (or where a more experienced gamer could assist a younger one), but it sounds like both players have to stay on the same screen which is less helpful for these later scenarios.

The premise and the occasional emotional beat are interesting. Meeting new little people who personify concepts familiar to a child's life is a novel angle to a game, and I liked the idea that they spoke different languages as seen in little speech bubbles and their names (for me, this was English, a Cyrillic language, Korean, and Japanese respectively). The credits thank four names who are presumably the children of Takahashi and someone on the publishing team for inspiration, the idea being that the game in some way represents a child's growing understanding of their world. And the presentation is very childlike to fit this theme. I'm just not sure an actual child would have the patience to jump through some of the hoops on the way to the ending.

There's some fun moments along the way. The Mayor becoming a detective to track down missing roe eggs from a maki sushi, temporarily swapping out his hat and face to do so. Flying up on a balloon to retrieve a telephone handset from the Sun. A mock "boss fight" against a doll to reconstruct its face, with individual eyes/nose/mouth climbing up it. Each object has a Pikmin-style naive description of its nature and origin in a compendium. Also, after completing the story you can unlock Katamari's Prince and Noby Noby Boy himself! But for me the most resonant parts were the very beginnings, where you're just learning the rules and making new concepts from scratch, even if each step is prescribed.