Katamari Damacy has one of the catchiest gaming soundtracks of all time. Just put it on and try to keep your toes from tapping. So it should come as no surprise that director Keita Takahashi’s most recent game was also announced with an absolute earworm of a title song, and a characteristically bizarre premise to boot. But while Katamari Damacy backs up its quirky premise and great soundtrack with a fantastic mechanical hook, Takahashi’s latest, made at his new studio uvula, tries to succeed on charm alone.
That song that accompanied To a T’s reveal sums up the game’s whole deal in just a few lines like “I don’t how I became the shape of a T,” “the little things are hard for me,” and “I’m not afraid to be me.” The game stars a teen named Teen whose arms are permanently stretched into a T pose, and their dog, Dog, who helps them with things like brushing their teeth and getting dressed. Told in eight chapters spanning about four hours, To a T follows Teen across a week’s worth of school, home life, and alien encounters with plenty of style and humor.
In many ways, To a T feels like a particularly strange kids cartoon. Each episode begins with the intro song that played in its reveal trailer and concludes with an excellent ending theme by Stephen Universe creator Rebecca Sugar. Teen and other characters regularly turn directly to camera to address the audience. It’s full of great character designs, including giraffes and other animals who casually live side by side with humans. There’s even a chorus of Teen’s classmates, borrowed from an ancient theater tradition rather than TV shows, who appear from time to time to comment on the story.
To a T’s cartoonish presentation won me over quickly, but it’s also what eventually soured the game for me. While it’s an incredibly stylish and often funny story, it feels even shallower than an average kids cartoon, full of repetitive dialogue and story beats. The eight episodes of the game don’t cohere into much beyond a cute, surreal slice of life with a crushingly obvious lesson to wrap it up in the end.
Even that might be fine if To a T’s gameplay held up its end of the bargain, but it also falls apart on that front after a promising start. The game’s hook is that, thanks to their unbendable arms, daily tasks are more difficult for Teen. Their entire morning routine, including eating breakfast and brushing their teeth, plays out in short minigames, which you can choose to skip after the first day. There’s even one for using the bathroom that suggests that Teen’s digestive tract is in urgent need of some medical attention. Tilting a controller’s joysticks to control Teen’s arms independently makes these mundane interactions a way for players to embody Teen and understand how much different it is for them to navigate the world.
The trouble is, it never really develops from there. Teen’s classes provide a few more minigames, but they don’t add any depth to the experience of playing as Teen. It seems like there would be room for clever ways of turning just about any manual activity into a chance to bust out a bespoke control system with its own challenge, but for the most part, that’s not the case. The vast majority of what you’ll do while controlling Teen is just navigate them ponderously slowly around town from one scene to another, and here the town’s strange layout and the game’s habit of constantly shifting camera angles makes it far more laborious than it should be to figure out how to get there.
For the first hour or so, To a T was a joy, but that quickly faded into tedium thanks to the shallowness of both its story and mechanics. Most of my time playing the game felt like it was being wasted, but I still can’t help but feel a little fond of it now that I don’t have to deal with its slow pace and painfully awkward navigation. Its “just be yourself” messaging is saccharine and overplayed, but the sincerity and originality in how it says it is still charming. More than anything, I still just like the vibes of To a T, thanks to its great visual design and especially its catchy soundtrack.
