As a game, Wattam is a scatterbrained assembly of goofball logic and cumbersome mechanics. As an experience, it's an earnest expression of love, affinity, and forgiveness shared by all of its moving pieces. The product is a game that elicits joy without the videogame-y demand for precooked gratification. Wattam feels like a birthday party where all of your friends actually show up.
A portal opens out of the ether. Everyone is afraid. Out of the portal emerges a giant kitchen table, which is alive and named Thomas, and on top of it are a salt shaker, pepper, forks, and a mouth named Caleb, all of which are also alive. I become Caleb. I use Caleb to eat an apple who then transforms into a pile of poop. I am poop and I jump in the toilet, Charlie. This transaction makes everyone happy.
Everything that happens in Wattam makes everyone happy. It takes place on a planet blighted by an indiscriminate evil and reduced to nothing. (Re)Starting with a green cube named Mayor, and with the player’s help, the planet’s geography can be restored and its citizens can be returned home. Every time a problem is solved, a portal opens and a giant rubber duck or beach bucket or a birthday cake rolls in, loaded with new faces. Every time this happens, the words WELCOME BACK [object] are full the screen. This makes everyone happy, including me. Without conscious thought I always raised my arms in the air, unsure of what exactly I was celebrating but confident that I was celebrating something of merit.
Wattam’s a weird game. Its genesis is in Keita Takahashi, whose name you might recognize from Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy. The former was a landmark PlayStation 2 title that invented a whimsical new genre and the latter was a game about eating things and stretching the worm-like Girl to the end of the universe. I love them both, although after Katamari Damacy’s adorable madcap roll ’em up revolution, eating your own butt in Noby Noby Boy felt more like operating dangerous playground equipment than playing a videogame. In both cases, silly fun qualified as Takahashi’s endearing motif.
And so here we are with Wattam, a game that begins with devastation and ends with jubilation. The first time residents reappear, the Mayor discovers he can remove his hat and “Kaboom” everything, which is to say a bomb under hat explodes with confetti and sends everyone in the immediate area flying off like fireworks. Instead of implicit violence, Kabooming people is a boisterous handshake and a fleeting good time. Everyone here, no matter what, loves being Kaboom’d and zooming around like a loose balloon. This action also teaches the player what to do with Wattam’s citizens; everyone seems to have one particular thing they’re good at, and that talent can be used to help or enrich others.
From there, Wattam rapidly unfurls as a series of contextually-sensitive environmental puzzles. Hints are usually provided either by acute camera cuts that focus on an object that needs attention or dialogue from an affected citizen. Hats are a big thing in Wattam. One time I was able to summon a Yacht platform by putting a siren on my head, climbing a nearby large tree, and pretending to be a lighthouse. Other citizens have more innate abilities, like the pillow that can put everyone to sleep, a desk fan that creates wind, and the huge walking nose who can smell things and, somehow, summon seeds. Not every citizen is required to solve every puzzle, but it’s easy to see how they could all have a specific purpose.
Every citizen possesses a broad way to interact with their weird world. They can grab someone and hold each of their hands with the circle and square button. This is helpful if you want to drag someone along or form a ring of people for a spinning circle dance. Citizens can also climb each other, which makes reaching certain heights a bit easier (just seeing how many people you can try and stack is fun, too). Flicking the right analog stick switches the citizen you’re presently controlling, which relegates camera controls to 1996 on the L2 and R2 buttons. This is a strange decision that I understand in practice but not in execution as it is supremely weird to play something that looks and feels like a platformer but does not explicitly control like one. Still, with a bit of practice my brain resets twenty years and L2/R2 camera kind of feels like normal.
I have a weakness for non-human objects with happy faces. I also have a problem with assigning human names to various objects around my house. My pantry door is lined with cut-out pictures of smiling corporate cereal mascots and the plastic porcupine next to my front door is named Professor Shaughnessy. My wife suspects that I buy certain things because there is a smiling face on the box (she is correct). Literally everything in Wattam has the same emoting face and a name in a variety of languages, suggesting Wattam is a game meant to appeal to the unique Weird Stuff I never talk about but engage with, consciously or otherwise, daily. I felt seen when I played Wattam, even if it was over meaningless ephemera I do to entertain only myself.
For Wattam’s sake, it comes bundled with a story better than all the garbage circulating inside of my head. The dissolution of the planet by a Great Evil is spun into a metaphor about loss and love. Wattam contemplates that we can only learn to cherish loved ones if they’re taken away from us and uses its puzzles as a meditation on that paradox. The solution Wattam eventually proposes is forgiveness, which makes sense to anyone who has had to issue an apology. Forgiveness is a reset button. The translation of this idea to Wattam’s challenges and mechanics is not perfect—it’s a haphazardly put-together game by any measure—but the sentiment at the end holds true. It’s a wholesome escapade meant to express a very clever progression of emotions.
Wattam’s eclectic soundtrack outlines a purveying sense of euphoria. Every citizen in Wattam appears to have their own unique jingle. Not necessarily a full song, but a tune unique to their character. This works in tandem with the in-game music, which switches out percussive instruments depending on the active character. The melody will always bounce along, but it comes with a saxophone for the #3, a xylophone for the Fork, a trumpet for the Nose, a twangy electric guitar for the Octopus, and a spanish guitar for the Camera. It’s all wonderfully subdued and fantastic. Sometimes, when I was just walking around and see what kind of mess I could make, I left it on the Fork and just let the music play out while I did other things in the same room.
Elements of Noby Noby Boy and Katamari Damacy are pleasant and obvious in Wattam, but a better point of comparison, if you’re still trying to figure out what Wattam is, is David OReilly’s Everything. If Everything were about the exploration of objects and their relationship to the macro and micro universe, Wattam is about the personal relationship between those objects. Everything is complete detachment and Wattam is exclusively about attachment. Both are kind of oblique in their overt objectives, use buttons in weird ways, and aren’t concerned with conventional videogame behavior. It’s difficult for a game to be both an interactive novelty and an expression of an artist. Wattam sloshes around both ends but eventually manages a statement. It’s possible to experience joy without learning loss. Kaboom.
As a game, Wattam is a scatterbrained assembly of goofball logic and cumbersome mechanics. As an experience, it’s an earnest expression of love, affinity, and forgiveness shared by all of its moving pieces. The product is a game that elicits joy without the videogame-y demand for precooked gratification. Wattam feels like a birthday party where all of your friends actually show up.
