Alguns diriam que a interação é o que define a mídia videogame, mas não somente a interação entre jogador e jogo, mas interpessoal, e dessa vez Keita Takahashi leva esses conceitos a outro nível.

No escuro da noite, um quadrado acorda sozinho e seus olhos buscam por alguma companhia, ao não encontrar nada, só lhe restou as lágrimas, que convenientemente trouxeram um grupo de... pedras? ao seu encontro. Eles se encaram, o quadrado estranha, mas estava ali a oportunidade de fazer um novo amigo.

E com isso você entende por quais meios o jogo quer passar, as interações entre os personagens fazem que coisas inesperadas aconteçam e novos amigos apareçam. Wattam tem é um jogo ingênuo, e ele tem consciência de que aborda as relações interpessoais de forma muito frontal, já que é um jogo feito para crianças, literalmente, o jogo foi feito pensado para os filhos de Keita e Asuka Takahashi.

Existem aqui até maneirismos de um soft building ala Hayao Miyazaki em não querer explicar muito de como as regras funcionam naquele mundo, nada disso importa no fim, o que importa é que estamos aqui e estamos juntos!

Por todas as coisas diferentes que Wattam faz eu fiquei muito feliz jogando, desde a surpresa de um combate até uma sessão de investigação, mas para além disso, terminei grato, grato por ter todos os amigos que tenho.

Sights & Sounds
- As you've likely assessed from the promotional artwork, the visual style of the game is extremely cute
- The music is pretty catchy and probably the game's greatest strength. I loved how the music changed when switching between characters. The credits song is also nice and well performed
- The rest of the sound design was honestly sort of awful. At any given point all of the babbling and crying gives you the impression of being in a daycare

Story & Vibes
- In a nutshell, you play as a lonely green cube (the Mayor) who is trying to bring everything back into existence after the earth is destroyed
- Besides that somewhat grim undertone, the rest of the game is cloyingly cute. It's just not as charming as the creator's other games like Katamari

Playability & Replayability
- As the Mayor, you're mostly limited to walking agonizingly slowly, climbing incredibly poorly, holding hands with your friends, and blowing things up with the bomb you keep inconspicuously tucked beneath your fashionable bowler cap
- As you bring other characters back, however, you can switch to them instead of the Mayor. A few of them have abilities like eating other characters or turning them into poop. No matter which character you're playing as, however, you will still shamble along at a glacial pace
- Some characters have tasks for you to complete when they're introduced. These serve to move along the plot, but they're all very easy and largely tedious
- I did kinda like the design choices around zooming in or out to control different characters. Changing the time of day by zooming out and switching to the sun or ferrying around characters to different islands with boats/bowling alleys/tables was a neat idea

Overall Impressions & Performance
- I played the entirety of the game on the Steam Deck, so take this list of encountered bugs with a grain of salt:
- Two instances of events not triggering, two hard freezes, and crashing every time I closed the game
- There's a lot of grinding achievements but no gameplay incentive to complete them

Final Verdict
- 4/10. The music is excellent and the visuals aren't without their appeal, but I was happy to see the credits. It's not a "bad" game. I just wouldn't recommend it unless you're really interested in Keita Takahashi's works and it's deeply discounted

Keita Takahashi just knows how to make me emotional I guess. His approach reminds me a lot of Shigesato Itoi. In a way, most game developers are trying hard than ever to make games legitimate in comparison with other mediums. So many want to make their dramatic, pretentious "experience" and yet few are able to achieve that. I guess what I like about Itoi and Takahashi's approach is that they are just earnest. They want to make something with a lot of passion, they want it to be wholesome. They don't care if they are taken seriously, and yet their simple stories are able to pack emotion.

Wattam is able to switch mood really well, which is weird to say about a game with literal 'shit' in it. Maybe this is due in large part to the simplicity of visuals, or the diverse soundtrack, I'm not quite sure. It's always silly, and there is an underlying childishness throughout its runtime, and yet it had me in many different headspaces throughout. Mayor turning into Detective was genuinely hilarious. Maybe it was just the expression on his face, with the stubble around his mouth, and quickly sketched eyes. Then the Father goes on a monologue about losing his wife and kids, which is kinda fucked up for such a baby-sensory game. The Moon expresses an inner dialogue about the vein aspects that led him to be essentially a villain. This constant flipping of tone is weird, but it works? It's not some masterpiece, but it does work.

Wattam was refreshing to play, and is wholly unique. For that, I can appreciate it. It does feel really weird to write more than a one-liner for such a "dumb" game, but that's just an indicator of how special Wattam is.

GOTY 2019 - NUMBER TEN
Video version

It’s really difficult to know where Wattam belongs on this list, or even if it really belongs on it at all. I just know that this is my list, and I’m more interested in talking about it than Judgment or Cadence of Hyrule.

Wattam is a uniquely personal game, so if you’re an adult, it helps to know who Keita Takahashi is if you’re going to try to understand it. He’s a game creator who doesn’t play games. He’s a designer, but his primary interest is in making fun, useless stuff, and making video games is simply the easiest way to present that to a global audience. After somehow convincing Namco to fund and release his oddball, surreal sandbox toy thing, Noby Noby Boy (which one could easily speculate lead to a lot of arguments and frustration), Takahashi left his job and his home country, unsure what he should be doing.

Wattam’s concept came from Takahashi watching his young sons doodle and play with building blocks, coming up with mad wee stories and laughing. He decided that if he was going to make videogames, they should be those kinds of videogames.

If you played Noby Noby Boy, you might have some idea of what to expect, but there’s a little more to it. Wattam is a bit more of a game. There’s wee puzzles, progression and even a bit of a story. It’s less of a toy, though the intention is to have you pair different things together and see if something fun comes out of it.

Wattam feels like playing with a toddler, and following their logic. Seeing what stupid things cause them to errupt in fits of laughter. You can make your wee guy take off his hat and explode at any time, or decide you’re going to play as a mouth instead; eating everybody and turning them into poop. It’s stupid nonsense, and it barely holds together as a game, but it’s all very charming.

The game might come off as complete nonsense. Dancing scribbles. Takahashi is one of the most unguarded auteurs in the industry though, and his values and beliefs shine through all the noise and clutter. Broadly speaking, Wattam is about relationships, the way different things give each other purpose, and forms of universal communication shared between people who speak different languages. It’s also about valuing everyday trinkets that get taken for granted.

As the credits roll, you see the names of Keita Takahashi’s sons, who inspired the game, and of his composer wife, Asuka, who fans ought to know from her excellent contributions to Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy’s soundtracks. The song that plays over it honours the experience they’ve shared over the six long years of Wattam’s development, their love and their eager commitment to each other. At this point, it seems clear that Wattam is a tribute to those years of early parenthood, and who their children were during the game’s development. Wattam is a capsule of what was fun about the Takahashi family’s shared experience of those years. The game is rough and unsteady, but it gives the impression of an honest representation.

Six years is a long time. Maybe that’s worth remembering.

Que increible es que existan estos juegos. Esos primeros minutos son mágicos, no podía dejar de sonreír y reírme tontamente por esas emociones tan orgánicas, esas sensaciones tan puras. Es tan original y tan bonito a la vez... Es tan... Vivo... De cada cual según sus capacidades, a cada cual según sus necesidades. Vivir en comunidad es lo que garantizara nuestra felicidad. La coexistencia en el planeta tierra. Oh to vivir en una comuna.... Hay momentos quizas en los que se puede sentir un poco repetitivo pero se lo perdono todo.

Ah si, y lagrimee un poquito con este juego quirky al final...

I really tried to love this, but the way the game controls and handles its puzzles put me offside pretty much immediately. Everything you do in the game is introduced by a punishingly slow cutscene where the exact solution for what’s happening is presented to you, and then you do it - and doing it feels bad! The dynamic music is great but is undercut by the deeply hostile constant sounds of crying children. I'm glad people like Keita Takahashi get to keep making games, but this was so unpleasant to play

Oh to be in the mind of Keita Takahashi. I love me some 'Katamari Damacy' and thought 'Noby Noby Boy' was a weird albeit memorable experiment. Takahashi's wonderful imagination once again permeates from every second of Wattam, yet another weird game only this time revolving around holding hands, pooping and blowing anthropomorphised objects up with a magic hat. It sounds bizarre (it is!) but the sheer wackiness and affable charm of befriending sushi, a toilet and even a lawn mower is the attraction here.

Gameplay wise it's fairly basic yet experimental and is really just a sandbox for friendly kabooms! You switch characters, hold hands in a really finicky way and repeat until the world is restored. Fortunately it's not a long game so the freshness stays for the majority of the experience but I just wish Takahashi would put my ingenuity into the mechanic of his games like he did with 'Katamari' in order to have that addictive innovation while keeping the kawaii Japanese aesthetic.

So... it's hard to know how to evaluate a game like this, and thus, I can't evaluate it in stars. The presentation is solid, if simple. The characters are cute, it can be funny, surprising, and wholesome at times, and the dynamic soundtrack is my favorite thing here! Despite enjoying a lot of the weirdness and charm, I couldn't fall in love with it like I did Katamari Damacy, with which Wattam shares developers, and I think most of that comes down to gameplay. The camera feels bad on PC, even at max sensitivity, sluggish and awkward. The primary hand-holding, friend-climbing, and hat-bombing systems all work great, but there's little structure to support these mechanics. Sometimes they're used to good effect, like forcing a doll to relax long enough to apply its facial features, but mostly feel wasted and boring when your goal is simply "bring three things to a house". The goals are so basic that it doesn't seem to qualify as a game, but that's the thing: I don't think that's what Wattam was going for. It's a toy chest, a bunch of wacky digital friends to mess around with. Perhaps my experience was hampered by my expectations and not playing multiplayer, but at the end of the day, this game was not for me.

But I mean it when I say, I am THRILLED that it exists, that there's a space for creators to be unabashedly silly, and a space for gamers to make their own fun. If that sounds like your kind of experience, hop in, hold hands, and Wattam!

like katamari damacy and noby noby boy before it, wattam is foremost a vehicle for interaction.

well before super mario bros. existed, its makers learned the inherent fun of seeing your avatar react to the press of a button. they have since spent entire decades making games about how nothing could be more fun than pressing those buttons. keita takahashi has always pulled this trick: just as you don't jump in a mario game to avoid an obstacle — you do it simply because it is fun — every action in wattam is performed for the joy of doing something because you can.

if its priors sit at opposing ends of the playground vs. videogame spectrum (they don’t, btw), wattam fits closer to the middle. there is “game stuff” in here, sure, but it feels largely incidental. it is, broadly, a toy box wherein the smallest actions serve as their own reward. maybe you just wanna hold hands with your buddies or whatever. maybe you wanna eat the mayor. maybe you just want to poke and prod at some little dude to see what happens. who cares. do what you like. have fun. but by the time you are done, the totality of these actions will have filled the toy box beyond bursting point, and therein lies it’s greatest trick.

in most cases, the player will not feel as though they are consciously solving a puzzle or figuring out their next step. to engage with wattam in this way is to be a boring person with a boring attitude. but so long as one has maintained a brain unrotted by videogames and a heart not entirely sapped of whimsy, they will be constantly propelled through the force of their own curiosity.

quando eu comecei a jogar Wattam, eu não esperava que ele seria sobre perdão. o ato de perdoar mesmo. é uma historinha muito simples, mas é contada com muito coração. mas além de tudo, me fez lembrar o quanto que ser criança é bom. acho que eu queria ter sido criança por mais tempo.

é uma pena q esse joguinho tenha tido um desenvolvimento tão conturbado. claramente ele não recebeu o tratamento que merecia, e podia ter ficado um tempinho a mais no forno (apesar dos 5 anos de desenvolvimento). mas acho que isso não tira nenhum mérito dele. é uma experiência muito doce, pelo tempinho que dura.

I think my favorite part of this game was when I was reading everyones lil profiles in the Collection screen (and not playing it)
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Usually I have several thoughts to sort through but I think theres only really 2 very broad thoughts to have about Wattam:

- Very obviously, it is Keita Takahashi on full blast. Its full of silly, colorful objects that all have his now-signature face-doodles on them. The presentation is charming, the scenarios are creative and have a clear sense of humor. You turn things into poop within like the first 10 minutes. Giant picnic tables come swimming through the sky at you. The main character is named Mayor and he has the power to pull bombs out of his hat whenever he wants. There is also alot of more subtle visual humor thats hard to relate here cuz its so frequent but the expressiveness it brings to the game is hard to ignore. The game is funny

- Less apparent until you actually boot up the game, but Wattam doesnt feel good, at all. One of those contributing factors is the animation-first movement, where the character behavior is way more important than player control. The biggest issue tho is camera control, where 20% of the time youre left with really frigid shoulder button movement and the other 80% the game is wresting the camera away from you to show you something. There will be times where youre fighting with the game to get one of your cute little guys to stop rolling on the ground and the camera is ripped away from you to show you a very, very…… zzzz… very slow series of actions another character is doing somewhere else. For a game thats very charming and buzzing with like an innocent kind of enthusiasm, playing it makes me feel like Im in prison, not allowed to have any of that fun myself. I do as Im told, I get out of the way of the game, I let it do its thing and I have the privilege to watch.

It might be easy to say “This was a game probably intended for children” as a way to dismiss the criticism of how its structured - but I would argue that is a very poor opinion of children. Children deserve good games, good feeling games too. I dont know if you played games when you were a kid, or if youve ever witnessed a kid trying to play games, but games are very frustrating experiences for children. No matter how simple the subject matter is, kids still have to deal with the foreign concepts of “controllers” and “mechanics” to be able to engage with the material - and Wattam is the worst game on that front. I cant imagine a more frustrating game to hand a kid.

I regularly think to myself "this game is cool, but I wish it were more like Wattam".

Emotionally, I don't think I'll ever mature past this game. The Last of Us 2? Unplayable, Abby and crew should have just become friends with Joel and Ellie. LISA? What if instead of tearing up the post-apocalypse countryside, it was about hanging out with the fellas and nothing bad ever happened.

I don't really know what else to say other than "I play this game and I have a great time." If you want more out of your gaming experience than what's acceptable for four year olds, this probably ain't gonna scratch that itch. The vibes are perfect and in a better world, more video games would emulate this game's desire to put a smile on the player's face.