It’s a universal truth that crosses cultural boundaries: Middle school is hard. The awkward early teenage years makes everyone feel self-conscious, like an outsider, whether it’s an embarrassing pimple or your arms being permanently locked in a stiff T-pose. To A T, a narrative adventure from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, is a sweet-natured fable about growing up and accepting yourself. But while the narrative and world you occupy are cute and quirky, the act of playing never feels as playful as it should.
You play as a created character accompanied by your faithful canine companion, both of whom you grant personalized names at the start. Your arms are permanently stretched outward, stiff as a board, for reasons that you don’t fully understand. But you’ve made the best of it, learning to adapt with special tools like an extra-long spoon to eat your breakfast cereal. You can turn sideways to shimmy your way through doors. And your dog is apparently well-trained enough to help you change clothes or use the bathroom.
Naturally, this quality makes you an outsider. Everything you do is just slightly awkward and harder than it should be, and you’re bullied relentlessly by the other kids at your school. The writing is very sharp in capturing both the inherent silliness of schoolyard teasing and the way it can have a real impact on your mental health, making you preoccupied with the taunting even when the bullies aren’t around. Your avatar is just a happy, friendly kid who loves his favorite cereal mascot, tries to do well in school and at sports, and just wants to fit in.
Talking with Giraffe the sandwich shop owner in To A T
While it explores grounded themes, the setting is a fantastical version of a Japanese village. It’s occupied by anthropomorphic animals, most centrally a chipper giraffe who makes your sandwiches for lunch. In addition, this town is unmistakably inspired by the Japanese school experience, including the fashion of school uniforms and the requirement to change from your street shoes into school shoes when you arrive. But that also helps illustrate the universality of the theme–these feelings are something that any American, Japanese, or fantasy 13-year-old kid can relate to.
All of this is rendered in a cute, bright visual style reminiscent of Saturday-morning cartoons, right down to having a constantly reiterated theme song centered around the on-the-nose lyric, “You are the perfect shape.” The characters themselves are composed of simple shapes with doodled faces like a Peanuts cartoon, and the world is vibrant and clean. There are even little humorous touches in the art style, like how your dog has an X on its butt, to help complement the humorous writing. It’s a gentle style of humor: more of a warm chuckle than a belly-laugh, but I smiled often.
But while the themes and story are on point and the visual presentation is endearing, the act of playing To A T is much less engaging. For the most part you spend your time running from place to place to activate story points, which are told through speech bubbles with Simlish-style speech. It’s a surprising turn from the creator of Katamari Damacy, which was so centralized around the intuitive act of play.
There is no specific thing you’re doing in To A T, which leaves the experience feeling a bit disjointed and bare-bones. You can collect coins around the world to spend in shops for additional outfits, almost every morning starts with an opportunity to eat cereal and brush your teeth, you choose your outfit, and sometimes you’ll take part in a brief minigame. Eventually you gain the ability to fly short distances, which can help you reach new spots for coins. But it never really coheres into something that feels very compelling to play. In fact, my favorite episode was the one that put me into the role of another character entirely, because the story of that chapter revolved around a central mystery and had a series of simple puzzles to solve.
Then there are the ways that To A T just feels unintentionally awkward and frustrating. I say unintentionally because your T-pose lock is obviously meant to make everything a little more cumbersome, but other elements of the game feel like they aren’t intended to drive that point home. It can be difficult to find your way around town, especially since there are strict rules about only using sidewalks. The camera is fixed, but its position shifts itself while you round a turn, which can be disorienting. The game seems to know this and has your dog act as a wayfinder to your next objective, but even then I would frequently get turned around and have to check my map to reorient myself.
And while the story is charming, there isn’t much to it. The major conflict resolves itself around the halfway point of the eight-episode series, after which it starts to feel a bit aimless before coming back to hammer home its message even more pointedly. The final conflict and ultimate resolution help bring the message home and tie all of the previous chapters into a tidy bow, but it’s not saying anything that most players wouldn’t have already taken from the previous chapters.
All of this left me lukewarm on To A T, and wanting to like it more than I did. It’s a cute and charming visual metaphor, with some insightful and funny writing, and it’s a lovely parable about the struggles of growing up and feeling different. It’s a very gentle, likable story about a topic that games don’t often explore. But the story doesn’t have quite enough heft to last through even the relatively short playtime, and the act of playing it often feels tedious. There are individual things to like about To A T, but like its protagonist, it has some room to grow.
