Anapurna Interactive made their way onto the games scene not too long ago, but have already come out with a ton of amazing indie games from What Remains of Edith Finch to Kentucky Route Zero. Recently I got to go see a few of their new titles, and while I think Wattam will be a game that interests a good section of gamers and could be good for families, it was a tad too weird for me.

Wattam is a game from the creator of Katamari Damacy, but you might not know that at first glance that it is also a puzzle game. You play as — or at least start out as — the Mayor, a cube man with a top hat. You run the Mayor around an open grass field until you find a rock, a rock that turns out to be another weird anthropomorphous thing that you can take the reigns of. As the Mayor, you can hold hands with the rock and walk around together. You can switch to playing as the rock and walk around with the Mayor until you find a pebble, which, you guessed, it, turns out to be another character. You keep doing this until you get stuck like I did when I found the acorn. The problem was I didn’t know it was a puzzle, and that I had to plant the acorn in the ground, turning him into a tree.

The puzzles don’t get much more complicated, but are all different and weird in their own way. There’s a point where a character eats a bunch of fruit characters and poops them out. The new poop characters are flushed by the toilet character and made into gold poop. It’s really weird. Every now and then you’ll also get huge characters who will arrive that hug the walls of the big grass patch cube character that the game takes place on. There’s a big red balloon, a big toilet, and a whole bunch of other everyday items.



The art and music of Wattam are both colorful and simple, which works with the style of the game, but while each character puts a spin of the musical theme as you switch between them, the repetition of it over and over gets to be a little too much. Maybe if they had different themes for each character it would be better, but just changing the instruments and style of the main theme didn’t do it for me.

So while Wattam is not the game for me, it’s an incredibly unique puzzle game that does some interesting new things. It’s a game that makes you think different, especially with how odd the solutions to the puzzles are. It’s family friendly and could be a great game for little kids who would find the colorful characters and silly jokes entertaining. Wattam has charm, but it seemed to go a bit over my head when it came to the question of “why.” Wattam is coming to PlayStation 4 and PC sometime soon.