Sometimes, in amongst all the 1080p/60fps remasters, uber competitive shooters and realistic graphics, it's easy to forget that games are meant to be fun first and foremost. Sometimes it's nice to relax with a simple, silly game - and few games come as quirky and original as the games noted oddball Keita Takahashi, the creator of Katamari. With his breakthrough game, Katamari Damacy being about rolling all kinds of stuff into a giant ball, from paperclips to cats to entire galaxies, and his follow-up project Noby Noby Boy staring a giant stretchable, er, worm-like boy, whose only goal was to get 'long', his titles definitely skew towards the weird end of the spectrum. His latest? One in which you play as a happy-go-lucky green cube of a mayor, who has a rather large bomb tucked under his bowler hat.
Decisions, decisions...
How it came to be this way, we're not entirely sure - apparently it's an epic story, but essentially a series of unfortunate events caused a humongous explosion, which spread the people of Wattam all across the galaxy. So, the mayor does what any responsible leader would do, and sets about tracking down his lost denizens and bringing them back together with a bang. And by bang, we mean a quite literal boom, given that his strategy seems to be piling everyone up and detonating the bomb under his hat, sending them all spiralling up into the sky, to who knows where.
The logic behind building crazy stacks and chains of people and then exploding them all seems to be that, by creating as impressive a show as you can, nearby folks will flock to the source of the explosion to get a closer look - and when they come, they'll most likely stay and add to your increasing population. As you attract people who were lost in space, searching for their long lost home, you'll unlock new characters to play as, new levels and eventually, new worlds.
As you draw in more and more people, you'll find each is a unique character of their own, with their own unique sets of abilities. Whether they're the mayor or a deputy, who can both trigger explosions, or just a regular, totally average citizen, there's all kinds of silly things you can experiment with. From record players who's special ability is playing music for a party to a giant bouncy mushroom man to a cloud that can rain on a whim, half of the charm is likely just messing about, and making huge wobbly stacks of villagers to explode. Each level is home to a number of residents already, but they're all hidden or asleep, so you need to work out how to combine people's special abilities to rouse them - for example, raining on the grass as a cloud can bloom the sleeping sprouts into flower people.
The gang.
As a game that's about bringing people together (albeit in a bit of a strange way), it seems fitting then that Wattam also lets you bring along "friends and family" in local, everyone-on-the-sofa co-operative. It doesn't specify how many can play at once, but from the sounds of it, it's more than one - and given the growing size of your population, it wouldn't surprise us if it stretched to four. Whether you work together to play through Wattam's story, simply spend time running around, building towers and exploding them, or have one friend that doesn't play by the rules and sabotages all your attempts at playing some 'serious' Wattam, we can imagine it'll be a BLAST. Blast?! Explosions?! Get it?!
Wattam will be hitting the Playstation 4 at some undisclosed time in the future - we're imagining it'll be later this year, but nothing's been officially announced as of yet. In the meantime, why not check out the new E3 trailer below, featuring singing flowers, bowler hats and of course, oodles of cute and colourful explosions:
