Wattam is such a fascinating case study as someone who grew up playing Katamari as it taught me that a good number of Katamari's good decisions when it comes to making a good mechanical game were brought about by external forces keeping Takashi's influence at bay.

With an indie title he has full power over, Wattam feels a bit lacking in the gameplay department with extremely straightforward mechanics, but it doesn't overstay its welcome and provides an incredibly wholesome and emotional experience in its two hour runtime.

Wattam is a shockingly sparse game, so much so that it's actually quite difficult to talk about. Many times I was asked what I was doing in the game by my significant other, and the answers sounded like jokes: "I'm eating this telephone so it turns into an onion" - "I need to flush all my poopies so they turn gold" - "this giant cake had a factory inside of it where I met a talking iPad."

The game is about a little cube with a mustache that gradually accrues more and more friends, all anthropomorphized objects and fruits and appliances, each interacting with one another in cute ways. A rock and a pencil can hold hands. Your fan friend may entertain the little nuts by blowing them away, over and over. Mr. Onion may try to jump about with the flowers, but make them cry on accident. You might ride your balloon buddy up to the sun to ask it to turn in early. It's totally, utterly absurd.

It's over before you can really process what is happening, but I think that's for the best. The control scheme is straight out of 2004, and before long it feels like there aren't a tremendous amount of true surprises left, as you become accustomed to the whiplash. Mercifully, though, Wattam tidies up before it gets old, leaving nothing but warm memories of the ridiculous.

This is a wonderful and funny game about friendship and the circle of life. It's full of all sorts of colors and fun shapes and it's a fuckin pain in the ass to control anything.

So the actual gameplay loop is fun because you basically get new friends that are various items and you have to do favors for them. Like at one point a lil acorn is curious to grow and you help it become a tree or later on you find out trees can turn all these characters into various foods and so you take an onion to a floating island that's weeping because there's no sea and once you bring it the onion, it cries harder and makes its own sea. It's stuff like that which makes it fun to play and discover all that you can do in the game.

The controls are grade S bullshit though. ANY modern game in a 3D space that utilizes a controller has you control the camera with the right stick. THIS game decides to have you control the camera with the back shoulder buttons AND the right stick is how you switch characters. Frustrating. Also there's a mechanic in the game that lets characters crawl on top of each other but it's SUPER generous in what you can grab to the point where you can be walking past something, nudge into it, and suddenly you're climbing it instead of going where you wanted to. Blech. Oh also you end up with like 100 characters that you can switch between and control to varying degrees BUT this is awful because they all exist in the world at the same time and have their own shitty AI will to wander about. I can't count how many times I needed to leave one character in a space and then bring another one to that space only to find the first is like halfway across the map. Also there's a lot of sounds similar to crying and crowds of children laughing that, for me, got grating after the first hour. The game is a step away from being daycare simulator honestly.

Despite all this, the game is fun. I wanted to keep going through it despite how frustrating it could be. It has a good message and it carries the whimsy of Katamari Damacy with it while being its own thing. You get to blow yourself up to help your friends but also can turn them into food, poop them out, and flush them into GOLD. What the hell? Definitely worth getting if you enjoy Keita Takahashi's other works or just like something different and weird once in a while.

The sort of obscurist art that could only exist as a video game. I can't say that I was always having the best time - in fact, for such a simple game I recall ordering up a guide more than once - but I can say that I was always smiling, charmed and curious. Wattam hints at Katamari Damacy - which makes sense considering its lineage - without ever finding a way to bring that level of gameplay into this, but nonetheless a very approachable and charming exploration of how the ordinary and charming ought to be celebrated from time to time. I liked it quite a bit, and I think this would belong on any shortlist of "games your friend who doesn't play games should play". Especially if they like to fart and burp.

Started playing this before the pandemic in Feb where holding hands and having people come around unexpectedly was a great thing.

And finished it as we were going into our second lockdown and it felt a little weird and strange. Though maybe it gives some hope that after any crisis people can still find each other and bring out the best in each other.

There's not much gameplay here and like Katamari it's mostly about the joy and humour of objects.

In this one you start of as a cube (who has a top hat) and you do things in order to bring more living objects back. Each object that comes back is presented with a fanfare and a "Welcome back ". You can switch between objects as some objects have special abilities.

It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it's very laid back.

The game presents you with a final decision at the end and it's possibly the most thoughtful decision I've seen in a game in a while (which is odd, given the laid back and playful nature of the rest of the game).

I'm not sure how much of a difference the decision makes, but it's still nice that it was there.

By far the most wholesome piece of media ever concocted. Lovely aesthetic, fun happy little inanimate objects. Cheery upbeat music and sounds of laughter to force a smile out of you. The tasks are incredibly simple so any difficulty comes from trying to remember that the camera is controlled by the triggers and not the analog stick. The movement can be too clunky and slow and while this may have just been my PS4 being old or something, the performance was terrible which got very annoying. Thankfully the problems didn't have much time to set in since the game is very short. It was a nice experience with a surprisingly beautiful ending. It's just a shame the performance issues couldn't be ironed out before release.

Wattam is a very sweet game made by the director of Katamari Damacy, Keita Takahashi. Like his previous works it is a very silly experience overflowing with love for people with a tinge of melancholy. There is a very kind and philosophical undertone to Takahashi's games that I have always admired, and Wattam is not really any different in that regard. His games are as fun as they are human and i had a very good time playing through the story of this funny box-shaped mayor.

The game itself has a lot of problems on steam specifically though.... im playing on a steamdeck and the storybook cutscenes just kept skipping themselves for some reason. Others reported frequent crashing, which never happened to me but the framerate became pretty bad at some points.

The way the game controls isnt the best too.... you choose your character with a cursor that moves in 3D space, and as there are about 80 people you can choose to be, you end up struggling to pick out the one you want. Things also feel quite clunky and floaty in a way that becomes a hindrance when you need to do something. Moving ships between islands also feels clunky and i dread doing it sometimes.

The save system saves per chapter, which is a shame because if you dont fully complete a segment and have to leave, you'll be required to do everything all over again. I had two glitches which required me to restart and redo my progress which always sucks the air out of an experience.

But i still wish more people would play this game... i love all the wattams with their different abilities and personalities. Theres even different descriptions for each individual character so a lot of love went into making everyone feel happy and alive. Which character you play as also determines what the music sounds like; the soundtrack is fantastic and the dynamic music seems like it took a long time to create.

This game is really fun and heartwarming, so i would recommend it to anyone looking for a short silly time... but dont expect to get all the steam achievements, theyre a little bit much.... kaboom.

Wattam is a short, simple, cute, weird but somehow completely wholesome experience that I can't describe even if I wanted to.

Keita Takahashi yet again throwing concepts into a game that were formed using a word soup and somehow making something so, and for a lack of a better word, wholesome.

Wattam is a simple 'puzzle' game, in which you have to "recreate" the world which has been broken by "recalling" the characters (which, by the way, are mostly inanimate objects, shapes, numbers, poop, etc.) that make it up.

Now while this is a very charming game, sometimes the controls would absolutely mess with me. Most of the game is about holding hands with other characters, to either 'circle dance' (which was an a b s o l u t e pain might I add) or to take them somewhere and 9 times out of 10 either you or the other character would end up messed up from the stretching of the arms.

Apart from that little issue, the game was clearly made for kids so any difficulty or length issues I have with the game matter not. It was a fun time and I'd happily play another entry.

i had a brief opportunity to meet keita takahashi at a pax signing one year, while wattam was still in development. i had seen a tweet about the appearance ahead of time, but many others (who i assume hadn't) opportunistically used what they had on hand, or could purchase from the annapurna booth beforehand. there were a few shirt signings, of course - but keita seemed most pleased when people brought out any other stuff for him. he drew over top a page of someones sketchbook, adding extra characters to their scene. the guy in front of me took off his basketball shoes to get noby noby boy stretching around them. i had prepared by bringing a notebook i planned on using for the next year of college, or sketching and jotting ideas for games. he was disappointed to see it still empty. what i wasn't ready for was him to ask what i wanted him to put on it, i stammered something like 'uh, a cool creature?'. its sitting on the beach, and has an amoeba shaped head with 11 eyes. he ended up being pretty embarrassed about the pair of exposed breasts he tacked on after the face, and by the end appended a '?' to his signature to avoid total responsibility for the drawing. it's the only notebook i've completely filled out, and still on my dresser today.

that day ended up explaining a lot to me about what goes into his games. keita takahashi seems to have an acute fascination with clutter and stuff. his landmark title, katamari damacy involves collecting objects - how insignificant does each thumbtack feel by the time you're rolling up people, buildings, countries? noby noby boy focuses not only on consumption, but growth, as you lend your length to a concerted greater goal. a short lived AR app, wooorld, has users adorning their real life spaces with various interactive digital decorations. in these games there is not much to be said about any individual item other than it's mass - they exist to create a ramp of progression. they're just items.

by comparison, wattam is a game almost without clutter. there are still a lot of items, but now the game's levels are constructed as delicate table-settings. every chunk of the game a constructed tableau designed to show off the purpose and connection between each object. in wattam these things have shifted from intractable components, markers of score of a game, to the subjects of it. they are now characters for you to play with and as. in fact wattam celebrates the act of collecting items as you form a chain and explode in giggles and fanfare.

i really appreciate this change simply for the fact that it's so easy to come away from his previous work thinking about the falls of materialism, or some other pseudo-zen message about making a trip to the nearest goodwill. i really don't think those are components at play in his work. the items in wattam are selected lovingly in the way you might have a favorite pen at your desk, or book at your nightstand. not all our stuff is equally useful, but we still have reasons why we feature them in our lives. i cherish getting to stare at an 11-eyed screaming naked monster every time i grab a new pair of socks. i don't even like breasts. dare i say, wattam might be the game to explain to me what funkos, or nendoroids or whatever are all about...

keita's much more key outlook in his games is a straightforward message about love and unity. while a bit un-challenging as a concept, is kind of necessitated by his games' broad age appeal. it's no less obvious in wattam, where most the 'mayor' characters text bubbles are shown in different languages and everyone joins together to hold hands in the end. i won't spend much time on this as its pretty well tread elsewhere.

i think another way of viewing this theme of 'unity' is to look at the individual and collective value of each of these objects in the game. by the end they all form together to create mother earth. so i think something is being said here about being able to make use of, or at least enjoy all that we have. we have raw materials like stone, toys to entertain us, household appliances, tools. you could say the way characters like the mouth and tree interact is a facsimile of our ecosystem - producers, recyclers, consumers. the way one object might eat or morph another into something more suitable for some third object - these interactions are where much of the lateral thinking is expected of the player.

so with that, what is the game actually like to play? i first got a chance to try the game at that same signing event, paired with someone else who just happened to be in line. we quickly discovered that the hand-holding mechanic of the game applied to both players, and if one was holding on they could sort of drag you around, which made it difficult to progress through the game's 'puzzles'. it's a bit reminiscent of the main loop of most point and click games - finding new items, then dragging them over to every other interactable to see if something new comes out.

the characters you aren't actively controlling have some pretty simple but fun ai where they chase each other around or have different goals. in fact while i was struggling to fumble from one place to another to progress the game, the ai was creating new characters from it's interactions and practically playing itself! so before it was even complete i understood well what the ethos of the game was here. i didn't have such an opportunity to play the full title as a co-op, but i would recommend it as the intended experience. this is a game about being playful, and the best way to do that is with someone else.

out of all his work, wattam is the title that best executes this idea of 'play'. the game is not entirely a sandbox; the goals are vague but it's a fairly linear experience. it overall feels like pouring out a toy box on the floor and much of the game is driven by seeing what fancies you. to compliment this most of the games sound effects are recorded by voice, and the acting is comprised almost entirely of children. katamari damacy implements an almost arcade-style time limitation on levels, taking what could be very experiment-driven play to a chaotic rush to the finish. noby noby boy while a lot more abstract about its goal still has a specific task to accomplish. this is true of wattam as well, but for most of the game it is really not clear what you are doing, which makes the main motivation just seeing what the game drops in next. the story eventually does begin to unfold in a way that gives you a bit more purpose, though. this really makes much of the tasks of the game feel like they are there to be exciting and fun in of themselves; not within the context of your greater mission, as you mindlessly wander around and smash your little toys together. in a lot of ways this game feels like an iteration on noby nobys free form gameplay - you can kind of trace the path these games make into less and less obtrusive 'gamifying' of their main goals.

this lack of central focus does make the game feel smaller in scope than other projects, though i really doubt this is actually true with the more complicated work on ai and other systems here. but since the setting is mostly flat planes in a gradient skybox, it does have me missing a bit of the 'grandness' of the settings of katamari. i ended up wondering if challenges of working under annapurna, or the newer engine technologies had them cutting down aspects of the core concept, because i do think the game is sincerely a major effort to offer solutions to questions and concepts his older games have brought up. i get the feeling that another project of this size might not be attempted by the team, though they have recently been hiring for their next game. who knows - i'd certainly be jaded after a back to back experience with namco and annapurna like this.

i don't have to tell anyone that this game is delightful to experience. go jump around and explode yourself with 20 3d poop emojis. it doesn't stop being cute. but i wanted to offer up this commentary because i think this game has gone less visible than previous games, and people might wonder where it fits into his greater body of work. to me, wattam is the most telling piece so far and clarifies a lot about the rest of this designer's projects.