Funomena, the indie game studio responsible for the Katamari Damacy franchise, got a chance to unveil footage from their upcoming game, Wattam. Take a look at PlayStation’s announcement trailer below, first shown December, 2014, to get your first taste.
But that doesn’t tell you much, does it? The game follows the trend of creator Keita Takahashi’s previous works and is absolutely absurd to say the very least. The official E3 video is a bit more revealing of what can be experienced. Take a look below.
Now it all makes sense, doesn’t it?
All joking aside, this game aims to find a happy medium between Katamari Damacy‘s rigid time restrictions and goal-oriented play and Noby Noby Boy‘s carefree wandering play. Through the filter of the Funomena developers, this apparently ends up involving sentient objects, hand-holding, literally pooping, club dance parties, and soaring into the sky together. Go figure.
The core mechanics and backstory explaining why you do what you do are as absurd as any other part of the game. This world’s mythos is incredibly dark, and the juxtaposition of the environment and the narrative implications result in a truly unique overall tone for the game. Before getting to play, the game explains the past of this foreign world.
Sometime in the past, a female Earth-like planet, calling herself the Queen, did fierce battle with an evil entity described only as “a bad guy” (and who oddly resembles the characters of Katamari). The bad guy wins the fight, but the Earth/Queen has a trick up her sleeve…or under her crown. Like the character, Mayor, from the trailers, the Queen has a bomb beneath her cap, that drives away the bad guy, but shatters the planet and its inhabitants across the cosmos. All that remains are sentient objects and plants. The protagonist, Mayor, is alone and isn’t sure anybody else is out there.
So the player is set free on a grass covered brick with a tree at its center, all floating happily in colorful space. The objective? To hold hands with or stack up as many objects as you can find or coax out, then reveal the bomb under Mayor’s hat. They all explode and blast off into the sky together, happily rocketing upward and toward the heavens. These games are really an acquired taste.
The explosion is “sooooooo fun,” to quote Mayor, and attracts the attention of far away objects that are added to your brick of land, increasing the variety of different things you can do. There are countless ways to interact with hundreds of objects, and no time restrictions. This last video displays practical footage of real gameplay, so check it out.
Sony is publishing the game, and it’s going to be a PlayStation 4 exclusive title. Unfortunately, the game is still in development and a release date remains to be decided, but fans of Takahashi’s previous work surely have something to look forward to in Wattam.