Review: Wattam Whimsically Tasks Us with Finding the Epic in the Mundane

Wattam communicates a poignant, refreshing, and all-too-necessary joy in the face of adversity.

Wattam
Photo: Annapurna Interactive

One of the characters you play in Wattam is the Mayor, a green cube with a little mustache. He wears a black bowler hat, and beneath it is some kind of regenerating bomb that sends him and anyone in his vicinity rocketing through the air with colored smoke trailing behind them. But this bomb isn’t a malicious weapon, as it acts as a sort of activity that the Wattam world’s denizens, an assortment of inanimate objects with faces and limbs, all crave, begging the Mayor to “kaboom” them into the air. Sometimes, after a particularly twisty kaboom, they’ll vomit little rainbows into the grass.

If everything I’ve described thus far sounds hopelessly weird and discombobulated, it gets even more so. But it also makes some measure of sense within the colorful, anarchic, kindergarten-evoking aesthetic of Keita Takahashi, who’s best known for creating the equally peculiar Katamari series. Wattam, though, is more free-form than those games, functioning like a playground for the various objects that the Mayor befriends through activities like kaboom-ing, climbing on top of characters to form a big precarious stack, or locking hands so their individual soundtrack themes layer on top of one another.

There’s almost a method to Wattam’s dream-logic madness, as the world has ended, and everything in it has been scattered to the void. The Mayor starts out alone on a grassy expanse, and across the game’s few hours you’ll rediscover that which was lost in a mysterious apocalypse. Sometimes the characters, like a tiny stone, simply appear as though they were there all along, but mainly groups of characters arrive through holes in the sky while riding on the backs of giant floating tables, chairs, and other things that latch onto the environment with their massive hands. A big table, for example, will drop off some sentient utensils, while a large toilet might arrive carrying another, smaller toilet. Everything is greeted with a “welcome back” message, in a little pop-up window for smaller objects (“Welcome back, fork”) and in huge, screen-filling font for big, flying transport entities (“Welcome back, table”).

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With its themes of cooperation and putting the world back together, the game oddly treads similar thematic territory to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, while its sprawling portrait of a universe at multiple sizes recalls David OReilly’s Everything. But as with Katamari, Takahashi’s gentle and simplistic style approaches these ideas in ways that are at once pleasantly straightforward and hilariously unexpected, providing missions that require you to harness the surprising abilities of the growing horde of people-objects who all have individual, mundane names like Charlie and Eric. Completing these missions prompts the arrival of more characters, who are attracted by the presence of the friends you’ve helped.

The missions divide Wattam into essentially a series of comedic vignettes, an assembly line of wildly differing abilities up through the end of the game. Though you’re free to, say, turn on the fan that blows away characters at any time after it’s introduced, many of the abilities are used once or twice before something new appears and the lovely, offbeat soundtrack changes according to the task. The whole experience is wildly unpredictable, with the occasional bits of repetition lulling you into a false sense that you’ve seen all of what Wattam has to offer. Every time the game seems close to running out of creative steam, it adds some ridiculous new wrinkle seemingly for the hell of it, like a bizarre cooperative boss battle or the disembodied mouth that transforms everything into sentient cartoon poop.

Though a lot of the comedy here is born out of how totally inscrutable the game is, with objects arriving according to no apparent hierarchy whatsoever (a camera, for one, might appear before an ice cream cone does), the themes of Wattam come through clearly. The game muses about how sad it is that we need some kind of catastrophe to appreciate what’s in front of us, asking the player to revel in the small pleasures of things that seem, at first, totally insignificant. Through deceptively simple mechanics, music, and art, Wattam communicates a poignant, refreshing, and all-too-necessary joy in the face of adversity.

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Score: 
 Developer: Funomena  Publisher: Annapurna Interactive  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: December 17, 2019  ESRB: E10+  ESRB Descriptions: Crude Humor, Mild Cartoon Violence  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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