You Probably Won’t Play Another Game like ‘to a T’ This Year
92To a T is a Perfect Kind of Silly
Thank you to the publisher for providing a code for coverage and critique purposes.
To a T had a bit of a perfect formula going for it before its launch. It's the first major game from Uvula, the development studio founded by Keita Takahashi and his wife, Asuka Sakai. Keita is widely credited as being the man behind the Katamari franchise, and Asuka did sound not only for Katamari Damacy but also for Ridge Racer and Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere. Almost all of Keita's previous work was made with Namco or other teams. And if you want to play anything Uvula has made before now, you either have to buy a larger bundle on Itcho with a handful of smaller games, buy a PlayDate for Crankin's Time Travel Adventure, or go back in time to 2013/2014 to catch the handful of times Tenya Wanya Teens was played as part of a tour of the game. Even then, those last two were made in collaboration with other teams.
This is all to say that To a T, or any game from Uvula, has been a long time coming. Fans have been hungry, and in return, Uvula has given a tale that goes down incredibly easy, even if a few small bits got caught in my throat.
Here's what happened when I played To a T, and why I kinda can't wait to see what Uvula is up to next.
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With the sales pitch out of the way, let's get to one more, but this time for the game. To a T is aptly named, as you play a young child who is permanently shaped in a T pose. Getting to their 13th birthday, with the help of their dog, who helps them change, assists them in going to the toilet, and a whole host of other activities, they dream of a great storm harming their home, until they find themselves back in the relative mundanity of their bed, complete with a theme tune about the game that plays multiple times throughout the game.
And this is very intentional. The framing of the show, and its looks and humour, feel reminiscent of a Saturday morning cartoon. The theme song punctuates narrative arcs and takes on a different form as you play. In the same sense, there is a closing theme sung by Rebecca Sugar of Steven Universe and Adventure Time. This is a very fitting choice for a number of reasons, just one of which being that their soft-spoke, pretty vocals, accompanied by a choir and horns, make for a very relaxed stoppage in the story.
The gameplay hook is that all these little activities you do day to day, like washing your face and brushing your teeth, become a much more active process of leveraging our character's arms to the right position, sometimes with the help of our dog. It's not nearly as involved and messy as the likes of QWOP or Octodad, but it feels like it springs from a similarly tactile school of thought.
And it being your 13th birthday is such a sweet and succinct way to explain the tutorial process. You start off with all these manual decisions, but eventually your mother says 'Well, they're your responsibility now'. If you forget to wash your face, you will just have to deal with having sleep around your eyes in cutscenes. And you, being a child, are fittingly kinda messy. It's a very unifying concept between the character you play as and the bullies who make fun of you for your T-shaped arms. You are all just kinda gross kids.
There's a great sense of comedy to the mechanics of the game. Rather than giving you a single button prompt, you can press and unpress them in the middle of most actions, which means I repeatedly got a laugh out of rinsing my mouth while looking directly at the dog or never quite grabbing items I was going for.
The game moves quickly from these manual movements to teaching you to spin for traversal or use your unique shape to your advantage, and this touches on kind of the whole point of the game. The theme song shouts 'you are the perfect shape' at our character as they stumble through, exploring their worries out loud. The world tries to be accommodating of our characters with special spoons and taps wired up by their mum, but the bullies and trials of everyday life prove to be a challenge that the theme song doesn't really acknowledge.