168. Wattam (Funomena, Playstation 4, 2019)

Wattam is the latest game directed by Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi. Wattam is primarily about making friends, holding hands and exploding. You start by controlling the mayor, a green cube who has the ability to generate a bomb from underneath his hat, and the game concerns his quest to make new friends and visit new worlds. Each new character you befriend can also be controlled, and many characters have abilities that only they can perform.

While many characters are befriended just my having the mayor explode a bomb near them (all the characters love flying up in the sky form the explosion), other potential buddies will have stranger requirements, like a mouth that needs to eat a certain number of other charters, or an acorn who can turn into a tree that is then able to turn other characters into fruit. New mechanics are constantly being introduced, but never feel overwhelming or confusing.

When I first played Donut County, I said that it felt like a game that Keita Takahashi would make if he had unlimited freedom. Well I was a little off, but that's basically what Wattam is. It feels like a kind of hybrid between Noby Noby Boy and Donut County. If you just want to hang out in the world and play around like in Noby Noby Boy, there's plenty of that, but if you want to focus on an objective (like in Donut County), there are always new whimsical / bizarre objectives to focus on.

Keita Takahashi games have typically featured actions that are mindlessly fun at a basic level: rolling, stretching, growing. But instead of focus on a single or small handful of mechanics, Wattam finds its joy in giving you as many fun actions as it can think of. Characters can climb on top of each other to form huge stacks, or hold hands and spin in a circle, and even basic video game things like taking off headwear are turned into fun physics-based actions.

The game is also triumphant in its presentation: the graphics are basically an up-rezzed version of Takahashi's trademark style, but everything is alive. The characters all have child-like voices, so it can kind of feel like taking care of a bunch of babies, but it also has a "everybody is the same and loves to play" message that is hard to not appreciate, especially in this day and age. While 15-year old me might have thought that Wattam is a little too childish, 30-year old me can't stop smiling and wishing the experience would last a little longer.

5/5, a game that never stops asking "wouldn't it be fun if..."