Over the five or six hours it takes to play To a T, I’ve had a series of revelations that in turn built to one giant revelation: I have had the wrong idea about pretty much everything here. As a result, I’ve never played a game where I spent so much of the time simply trying to work out what it’s doing. What’s the intent, To a T? What do you want to be? It turns out I wouldn’t truly understand any of this until the final credits had rolled. In fact, I’m still thinking about a lot of it. Either way, what follows isn’t a review so much as a journey – and I’m afraid it probably contains things you might not want spoiled. Be warned.
To a TPublisher: Annapurna InteractiveDeveloper: UvulaPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X.
To a T is the latest game from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi. Katamari is a good starting point, because it’s probably the moment I started to go wrong here. Katamari’s all about being a strange little fellow who pushes a big ball around, and the ball is sticky and picks up all the stuff it rolls over. You start off picking up paperclips, and by the end you’re rolling up entire continents. When Katamari came out, people found it unclassifiable, but one thing everyone could agree on was that it felt incredibly good to play. Rolling that ball, picking stuff up, it was a sensory delight.
So after ten minutes of To a T, I was like: oh, this is the inverse Katamari. The game seemed deeply classifiable, and yet nothing felt very good. (When I say nothing felt very good I mean the game moves slowly and with many interruptions and the camera needs constant adjustments.) Strange choice, but these are strange times! Toot toot! My journey into wrongness had begun.
To a T is a game about a kid named Teen who is stuck in a permanent T-pose, with their arms held out to each side. Over the course of each day we guide T through washing and having cereal and cleaning their teeth, all of which are made new again by the challenges of that T-pose, and then we head off to school or to explore a little town, while a wider story unfolds. Fine, I decided. This is a narrative game with open-world elements – the town is laid out for you from the start. And it’s also deeply concerned with the experience of disability. Teen’s T-pose is a way of exploring what it’s like to live in a world that isn’t made for you and your needs. Onwards.