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
- 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