Wattam review – wacky world where, from acorns, golden poos grow
Over a decade has passed since developer Keita Takahashi’s first major work in surrealist game design. Katamari Damacy – a glorious fever dream of the PlayStation 2 era which was recently named one of the Guardian’s 50 best video games of the 21st century – helped cement Takahashi as a connoisseur of the delightfully wacky.
Now, six games and two console generations later, the game designer has released the latest in his absurdist oeuvre. Wattam is the first project Takahashi has created with Robin Hunicke’s studio Funomena. Like the Katamari series, Wattam features a similarly eccentric universe and cast of characters. But unlike its predecessors, Wattam’s eccentricities fail to help it overcome extremely repetitive gameplay.
The game’s greatest strength is its sheer abundance of playable characters. Set in the aftermath of a mysterious cosmic disaster that sent every object in the solar system scattering across the universe, Wattam begins by dropping you into the role of a lonely, cube-shaped mayor in an uninhabited 3D world. But eventually you’ll be playing up to 100 different characters – switching from humanoid flowers to bipedal trees to planet-sized plastic ducks to anthropomorphic turds, all strange, sentient creatures who are triggered into existence as you progress through a series of missions aimed at restore the universe as it once was.
Each of these characters has their own particular forte. A sentient acorn, for instance, can burrow into the ground to transform into a tree. That tree can later be used to inhale other characters and then spit them out, transformed into different fruits. In a later puzzle you’ll be introduced to a large, walking human mouth which can be used to eat these fruits, then defecate them out, transforming them again, only this time into walking turds. This triggers a toilet into existence, which forces these turds into its own mouth-like bowl, thus creating golden turds that can be used as an alternative topping on an ice-cream cone. That’s an actual objective in the game.
The underlying philosophy is pretty clear, and you could argue that it is a precient message in our current political climate. Even the game’s title signifies cooperation. The name Wattam is actually a combination of two words – wa, the Japanese word meaning harmony, and the Tamil word vattam, which translates as circle. Wattam is less about individual heroics and more a lesson in working together. The game offers a utopian view of the world where no character is more powerful than any other, and puzzles can only be solved communally. In fact, friendships and cooperation permeate the game so deeply that you will not be able to progress on a new planet without first holding hands with another character and spinning together in a literal “friendship circle”.
But Wattam quickly settles into a monotonous pattern of activities. Plant a seed, grow a tree, eat a peer, poop a fruit, eat a fruit, poop again, repeat the cycle. Other times the game will give you tasks to carry out which you’ve previously already completed many times. You will repeatedly be asked to find and return the handset of the telephone character across a series of near identical missions, or to gather your cohorts together again and again to make them explode – this is one of the game’s most overused quest types. By the time you’ve successfully completed all the quests in the first of its four floating worlds, you’ll already be well acquainted with all Wattam has to offer.
Like Katamari Damacy, Wattam is a feast of visual gags and imagination. But Takahashi’s newest project ultimately doesn’t have the necessary depth of gameplay to transform itself into more than a silly yet loveable romp.
