Child’s play
Wattam is a game best left for the kids
Wattam Annapurna Interactive Available on PlayStation 4, PC
Keita Takahashi’s games are preoccupied with objects. They are also very silly.
In 2004, his game Katamari Damacy — about a little prince charged with rolling up Earth’s objects into increasingly larger balls — became a cult classic. His new game, Wattam, is about the relationships between a large group of objects. At first I found it infantilizing, but after tweaking an audio setting and getting further into it, my opinion mellowed and I saw it more as agreeably strange than wholly off-putting.
Wattam has a relatively subdued beginning: “Long, long ago, everything existed in this world. But then ... Everything was lost. And no one remembers what happened back then.”
Soon we see a mustachioed green block, with a tiny hat on his head, sitting on the edge of a green surface. The green block cries from loneliness. He ambles over to a stone and sits on it. He’s then surprised to see a smaller rock in the distance. Picking it up, the green block — who we soon learn is called the Mayor — is surprised to see the little rock come to life. The rock tells the Mayor to chase it.
The little rock then says it’s time for the Mayor to be chased and the tables are reversed as you use the right thumbstick to select the rock and take control of its movements. When the little rock draws near to the stone on which the mayor sat, the stone, too, comes to life. The Mayor doffs his hat to greet the stone, which causes a magical bomb to fall off his head and explode, sending him into the air trailed by green smoke.
The rocks ask the Mayor to go kaboom for them. To do that, the Mayor must grab their hands and use his new-found ability to send everyone shooting giddily through the air. Soon arises a flower that can’t wait to go kaboom. So begins the bizarre chain of events that leads to the introduction of new objects and seasons: A nose wants to smell a spring scent; a tee wants to eat things that will lead it to produce fruit; produce enough fruit and a giant table will appear from the sky bearing a fork, a spoon and a mouth. If you use the mouth to eat things it will produce poop, which can be flushed once the toilet shows up.
Figuring out what each object needs to feel happy and complete, thus causing a new object to appear is, on a gameplay level, what Wattam is about. Wattam’s nursery-room atmosphere is furthered by a chorus of babyish voices that babble in the background and annoyingly exclaim whenever the Mayor uses his magic bomb. Thankfully, the voices can be turned off by adjusting a setting.
My early dislike of Wattam mellowed as the game went on, mainly because of how it leans into its weirdness. Even so, I can’t say that Wattam makes for anything other than a clever diversion, best for parents and young children or those besotted with cuteness.