It’s quirky enough and happy enough to win over all but the most hardened of hearts, and unless you believe games should be serious business at all times, it’s well worth checking out.
Wattam flaunts the same absurd, childlike humor that Katamari Damacy did, setting the bases of its design in the logic of the playground, but this time Takahashi offers a different game - a miniature sandbox in which the rhythm is dictated by the player, with a fine story and dozens of lovely characters.
OK, this game is nuts. Just plain nuts. I have no idea why and what it is, but its just a ridiculous joy to play. I have no idea what to do, so I just go around setting off party poppers, making poop and guiding fridges and toasters to floating islands. Yeah, dont take it seriously, just enjoy the madness. I do.
Completely magical, light and delightful. A playful journey with many surprises... the puzzles are simple, but enjoyable and the feeling of the game makes it kind of unnecessary to DO anything... a refreshing break from the norm.
It isn't often that you play something that is so pure and unapologetically itself, but that's Wattam. I don't know if I'll ever play another game that makes me turn all of my friends into fruit so I can progress. It oozes passion, and it has an infectious enthusiasm that's present in each and every aspect of it. Wattam never takes itself too seriously, and that makes it easy to buy into its world and suspend your disbelief. While the gameplay is all over the place, Wattam is held together by themes of friendship and a cohesive soundtrack that actually leave you grinning long after you're done.
Wattam takes the concepts of action and puzzling, and makes them its own. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting all of the wacky and strange characters that Funomena has conjured up. Starting with the lonely mayor and ending with an entire community of over 100 playable characters is a very satisfying progression. However, Wattam doesn’t provide the extra layer of gameplay that I found myself yearning for.
For maximum enjoyment, Wattam expects you to meander, to mosey, to stride. A frantic pace will only lay bare the shaky controls and the counter-intuitive camera setup. Take your time, the game insists. Speak to every new citizen, wear all of their hats, propel them skyward with your hat bombs. This way, the good times can dwell while the pockets of misery remain distant and hazy. For me, the off-putting voices and the clumsy controls work with the sparse conceit to create a world that’s oddly ill-fitting. The idyllic madness and the slow, sparse mechanics butt heads to make a game best approached with caution and care. Choose the world of Wattam at your most studious discretion, my friends.
As charmingly idiosyncratic as you’d expect from the creator of Katamari Damacy, but although the harmonious message is clear the game itself is a frustrating chore.
Wattam, with its simple and charming art direction and puzzle/platformer-adjacent gameplay, is kind of similar to Noby Noby Boy, but different, and unlike most things out there.
You need to be friends with, or at least in contact with, your inner child to appreciate the childish, weird, cutesy, silly, joyous, humorous, playful, uplifting, mostly sensible nonsensical stream of consciousness game design that Keita Takahashi and friends have produced.
Smell the acorn. Eat the nose. Make fruit. Eat the boneloaf. Flush the poop and stack the golden poop to impress the bowling pin. Welcome back table.
Game will make you pull your hair out. I loved Noby Noby Boy for PS3 from the same creator. I though this would be like that. It is not. And if you are a trophy hunter know that the chances are high that the "struck gold" trophy will glitch on you. Turn everyone into gold...except characters will disappear or simply refuse to let you turn them into gold. Glitched trophies are an unforgivable gaming sin in my book. Especially if they are never patched. Shows the creators don't care about their game or those that buy it. This game's glitched trophies have not been patched 6 months after release. I really wanted to like this game. But I would not recommend it.
Katamari Damacy is without a doubt one of my favorite video games of all time, so when I heard that the director of said game; Keita Takahashi was making a new game I got extremely excited. However, after my extremely short lived time with the game, I left incredibly disappointed.
Wattam has you playing as and swapping between a large number of different and colorful characters to goof around and solve ‘puzzles’ with. Most of these characters play exactly the same as one another, with their only distinguishable differences being their appearance. All of the characters you currently have available roam around four different, floating islands the game takes place on, and you will be swapping between them fairly often. While having the four different floating islands to mess around on may seem nice at first glance, they’re actually all pretty much exactly the same in layout, and only one of them changes the terrain to deviate from the completely bland and flat layout of the other islands. Much like the characters, they all feel the same but look different to one another.
The game is kind of structured around a linear level lay-out, but you’re able to do whatever you want during these levels and in-between. ‘Levels’ often consist of a new character(s) appearing and asking the player a request of some kind. Almost every single one of these requests is:
- Finding a specific character and talking to the NPC in question. Characters often move freely around the four different islands when not under player control, which means you have to slowly transport them between islands every time you need them, which gets extremely tedious.
- Using one of the few unique character’s abilities (which always pretty much have no use outside of the requests they’re introduced in)
- Holding hands, running around in circles or stacking characters on top of one another (which has no use outside of these request either)
Every level basically gives you crystal clear instructions, leaving nothing up for interpretation or figuring out. It’s a fetch quest after fetch quest, and it gets old extremely fast. And there is nothing else to do in this game. You finish an easy and boring fetch quest, sit through a long-winded and dull cut scene, and then repeat. There are no interesting areas to explore, not interesting characters to play with, nothing to find or look for, no puzzles, no challenges to overcome, there is nothing. The game prides itself on its colorful cast of characters that you can play as – but you can’t do anything with them. You walk around the small maps and stumble from boring level to boring level. The game tries to create a sense of scale by letting you zoom out the camera and play as large ships of sorts to let you transport your characters from island to island, or even play as the islands themselves – but once you zoom out that far and start moving around you find out that the games universe is not only completely empty, but extremely small as well, ruining any sense of meaningful or impressive scale they were going for.
None of the characters have interesting abilities to mess around with, and are only required for select levels. Very select characters can eat other characters which will then temporarily turn them into either various food items or different coloured turds depending on who you eat and with which character you eat them with. Apart from that none of the other abilities really do that much or have varying effects. The few characters with unique abilities pretty much only exist for very specific mission requirements, and are never required again, like the pillow for example who can make characters fall asleep for a few seconds – what does that do outside of the level it was made for? Nothing. Is it fun or interesting? Absolutely not.
If the game was aiming to appeal to extremely young children, I might lay off it a bit, but from what I can tell this game is aimed at audiences of all ages. And even if it were aimed at children, the game has clunky controls, a pretty significant asking price considering its tiny game length and virtually no post-game content, and a camera I was constantly battling and getting frustrated with. Not to mention the PS4 version has an awful framerate which fluctuated constantly when playing, which is inexcusable considering how simple the graphics are. The only good thing I can say about the game is that the dynamic soundtrack was really nice and relaxing to listen to, I loved the character and overall art design of the game, and the story was cute but simplistic. However, once the cute art style and charm wears off, you are left with what feels like an extremely underdeveloped and lackluster finished product.
SummaryThe idea for this game came from when Keita was playing with his two-year old son, and wondered about what if all toys lived, and connected by themselves? It would be such a fun world to explore and play with! The word “Wattam” itself is actually composed of the Tamil and Japanese words for “making a circle” or “making a loop”. The initi...