With To a T, Keita Takahashi almost made a normal game

Demo his new game to To report, Marutajima, creator of Catamari Damasy and one of the game’s great absurdists, was asked by the digital trending Giovan Nicolantonio what attracted him to make such a strange game. According to Colantonio, Takahashi thought the journalist sadly and said, “This time we were trying to make something normal.”

I’m happy to be able to report Takahashi’s innate playfulness, nonsense love and eccentric character design talent after playing through the game – my favorite to Penguins, penguins are penguins and remain uninterrupted. But I’m equally pleased to report that for Takahashi anyway he did not fail exactly in his quest. to is a game with a highly relevant story (a kind of) told in the traditional idiom of narrative action-adventure and accessible to the widest possible audience (which makes it a great game for kids and families). And this is a problem. This is because Takahashi has a sincere Plains Point.

toThe blend of stupidity and real-world sensitivity is encapsulated on that premise. The player assumes the role of a 13-year-old non-gender 13-year-old with his body in the shape of a t, with his arms awkwardly hanging out. This presents all kinds of daily challenges, from bullying at school to the awkwardness of eating grains with a really long spoon.

On one level, it’s a game differential joke. “T-Pose” is the default pose used by character modelers and animators, and bugs in the game’s code leave characters stuffed into this pose. It seems Takahashi wondered what life would look like for these unfortunate avatars. But his humor and empathy, and his determination to ground a bit of his strange story, leads him to a T-pose as a comparative phor – something that faces young life in the daily struggle of being physically disabled, or perhaps nervous, or different.

The adorable puffballs of teens and their dogs (we’ll give them both names) live in suburbs, parks, commuter trains, wind turbines, hilly seaside towns that fall from beautiful, sunny realism. of town.

To all of his surrealism, Takahashi is an inspiring observer of normalcy. Think of everyday objects and scenes that are lovely rendered by Katamari, and wait for them to be rolled up. Working with his boutique San Francisco Studio Ubra, he grounds to Repeating daily routines for teenagers: brushing teeth, choosing shoes, walking to school. No matter how wild the events in the game become (and they become quite wild), the routine persists. The game is episodically structured like a TV show, and continues to happily cut the opening and credits with catchy theme songs “Perfect Shape” and “Giraffe Song.” (The device was also used to do great work in Capcom’s violent 2012 anime style action game. Asura’s rage. More games need to do this. )

Within this structure, Takahashi leaves room for free exploration and play. You can collect coins, buy clothes and indulge in competitive meal mini-games at various stalls on Giraffe. (Takahashi’s long-standing obsession with food and food is still perfectly effective.) to It’s an incredibly straightforward and story-forward game, with mostly gentle communication from cutscenes to the next.

However, Takahashi is so restless that it can be boring to be stuck following the slightest paths of the screenwriter’s playbook. You may soon be surprised that Episode 4 has already made friends with bullies, is happy at school and learns how to control their special skills. to It then becomes clear that the storyline is opened up through a series with a very unexpected perspective shift, and that, insensibly strange, still brings back the points of the game about accepting imperfections and differences.

It’s a simple lesson and easy to convey. But that’s not simple – Takahashi is too wi-like and too sensitive to the sensitivity of human fo, making him playfully questioning about it. There are moments when townspeople seem to have temporarily persuaded that uniformity was a step forward, but still ominous. Naturally, it falls into a foodie giraffe and points out the flaws of this idea, considering a cube with no texture and no flavor in popcorn. “Believe in yourself, you’re in perfect shape!” declares the Greek chorus tied to the bow of the backing singer of the theme song. However, Takahashi (who wrote the lyrics) is also kind and skeptical of these kinds of positive mantras. “I don’t know what the perfect meaning is,” the song concludes. “I’m not afraid to be me.” He certainly isn’t.

to It was released on May 28th on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using the PrerElease download code provided by Annapurna Interactive.