Certainly not lost on me how shallow my revisit of LBP1 was. This was something of a childhood fave of mine I threw countless hours at; be it in couch co-op with fwiends or alone in my room exploring the avalanche of user-created content people spun together. Neither of which was a factor in me revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade now (jezus farckin christ!!!!), the servers are long gone and I’d need to be the richest man alive to bribe someone to play this with me over a cocktail of Parsec + RPCS3 input lag. Nobody will ever understand the joy of slapping the aztec cock motif on your co-op partners’ faces siiiighghhh…. Still, an illuminating experience that rekindled something in my heart about what LBP1 stood for!

Admittedly, I was always more of an LBP2 kid, these games being modular meant there was very little reason to revisit the first game once the sequel came out. There is a very strong difference in vibes between the two games though, if LBP1 excels at anything, it’s in encouraging the player to go off and create for themselves. It’s kind of wild the extent to which LBP1 offers and explains its tools to the player - its relatively simple levels make no effort to hide the gadgets that make ingame events work. Stages are littered with visible emitters, tags, switches, stuff like only-slightly offscreen circuitry that you can watch move around to inform a boss of its attack patterns and phases. It feels like a child’s art project or something, a simple array of pulleys and string animating rudimentary creatures and swings. It’s all so laid bare, I kind of adore it, and is certainly a handcrafted energy that LBP2 loses in its explosion of visual polish. The constant delivery of decorations, objects, prebuilt things you can make your own edits of, it’s no wonder this game blew up in the way it did - it’s with you every step of the way and always acts as a shockingly good teacher for its own mechanics.

Anyway this was a lot of fun. Unquestionably a hilarious platforming title to insist upon having no-death run rewards when so much of your survivability hinges on Sackboy’s physics-based astrology. You don’t realise how much nostalgia you have for something until the first thirty seconds of a song makes you tear up. This kind of williamsburg scrapbook aesthetic is hard to stomach nowadays but it really works here. Holy shit I can’t believe the racist caricatures this game has in every corner, this truly is a quintessentially British game.

Labyrinth, come in.

You beat the allegations, my boy. The worst Sonic game allegations, that is. I’m not sure how I should feel about the fact that I had a somewhat decent time playing this game. I played it as a kid and must have never made it past the 2nd stage and all I remember is it feeling SLOW and AWFUL and I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON. Which seemed to be the general consensus among players.

Believe it or not, a big motivation to make me finally throw away the money for Sonic Origins Plus was to have another go at these Game Gear games that haunted me on Mega Collection Plus as a kid, as well as the ones that weren’t included there. When I opened up the menu for them, the first thing that caught my eye was the critically acclaimed masterpiece in question, and you know what? It was alright!!! ?? Bit of a stretch maybe. It certainly was not <good> but it was by no means awful neither.

Laughable story premise aside, Sonic is actually kinda fun to control here? I’m not fucking joking. Slow as shit means spin dash encouraged, and you can go real zoomy zoomy, it’s a satisfying challenge to cancel it at the right time. As a speedrun this could be fun as heck I’m tellin’ ya, the most fun I had here were the couple times where I had just grabbed all the keys and had a small amount of time to bolt it towards the goal. I think if the game was built fully around this concept it could have found a real decent identity.

But this is Sonic LABYRINTH, and hence the levels are LABYRINTHs, with doors taking you to all sorts of places, you gotta keep track of where you’re going, kinda fun right? Like a puzzle or a maze?? NO. This actually describes the level design for about 3 of the 12 regular stages, the rest is just random pointless BS. In general it just feels aimless; questionable teleporters, pointless powerups with straight up bad placement, strange enemies that do not look like they should be in a sonic game (truthfully they do kind of fit I just think this one is really funny), and bosses that really could have been much better had someone but a just a little bit more thought into them.

That said it is mostly just aimless, and not frustrating. The only exceptions being one fuck off hidden platform in 3-3, and the general map in 4-3. I mean f*cking look at this. I understand the vision with this final level to be honest, you gave us our Sonic Labyrinth but it’s just jarring without some semblance of a difficulty curve to precede it. You went from somewhat maze-like levels, to aimless bs, to the world’s most complicated stage that feels like a puzzle in itself trying to figure out where to go even when it’s right in front of you. My mate said we should do a drinking game where we play that level without looking at the map and take a drink everytime you go through a door and I admit that sounds like the best worst time and ohohohohhh I am tempted!!

There is the matter of the true ending being a little obtuse but I forgive that because it added a slight layer of replayability with the hint given at the end. That said, it's still hilariously shallow.

The take home today is that I think the game actually has a solid foundation and controls well, it's just mostly ruined by a number of horrible design decisions that scream like the developers did not give any shits whatsoever. Therefore since it's a Sonic game with “good ideas”, it's actually 5 stars and the most underrated game ever and you guys just don't get it you don't see the vision open your mind for once…

Except it doesn’t have many good ideas, it’s just a worse Sonic 3D Blast.

(Maybe more like a prototype, since this came out first, hm!)

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.

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.