To a T review: imperfection defines Katamari Damacy creator's new game

Digital Trends

7 days ago

To a T
MSRP
$20.00
Score Details 'To a T's well-intentioned story about inclusivity misses key nuances about disability.'
Pros Inventive gameplay
Creative controls
Catchy music
Well-meaning story
Cons Weaker back half
Mixed messaging on disability
Lacking accessibility options
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There's no such thing as perfection. Just look at To a T.
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The latest project from Uvula, a small studio co-founded by Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, is a celebration of life's imperfections. It's an oddball game about a kid stuck in a perpetual T-pose who is trying to, quite literally, fit into the world around them. That's no easy task when you're dealing with grade school bullies who will take any opportunity they can to get a laugh at your expense — or trying to figure out where the sun went all of a sudden. Wackiness and sincerity come together to form a charming twist on the typical adventure game formula that has its heart in the right place.
Considering that thematic intent, it's no surprise that To a T is, itself, proudly imperfect. Its experimental spirit leads to a compact story that packs a lot of creative swings into eight disjointed chapters. I can learn to appreciate the structural imbalance as a byproduct of originality, just as I can forgive some unsightly bugs and camera issues, but it's harder to fully hand wave away root problems. As a story that wades into grounded conversations about disability amid cosmic silliness, To a T struggles to do its subject matter with the nuance it needs despite its best intentions.
Inventive gameplay
To a T's best quality is the fact that you can't box it in with easy genre descriptors. I could be reductive here and call it a narrative adventure game that unfolds like a playable anime season, but even that wouldn't do its playful creativity justice. So let's start with the basics instead: To a T follows a 13-year old, gender-neutral child whose arms are permanently outstretched, turning their body into a T shape. Their story is split into eight episodic chapters, each around 30 minutes, that focus on how they go about their daily life with such a unique condition. It's a tightly directed narrative game framed through fixed camera perspectives, but one that gives players a little free time to explore a small town, collect coins, and buy outfits between chapters. Each episode even has its own intro and outro sequences complete with original songs that are total earworms.
The project is consistently at its best when it's about exploring its protagonist's daily life. Like Katamari Damacy, this is a game that's just as interested in the controller as what pressing buttons actually does on screen. In the first episode, I need to help the kid get ready for school. When I sit down to eat a bowl of cereal, I need to pivot one stretched arm over to the box to grab it using the right joystick and then carefully tilt it to pour the cereal. I then need to do the same for the milk carton, using my left stick this time. The sequence ends with me leaning in to pick up an elongated spoon that stretches from my hand to my mouth and eating by flicking the stick up and down. It's a standout little scene that plays unlike anything else. And that's how it should be, because no other game stars a T-shaped hero, afterall.
Original moments like that make for a consistently charming first half that's all about adapting to the kid's world. What begins as a fight with the controller soon becomes second nature to my hands. I repeat the same morning routine a few more times, quickly finding that I'm able to brush my teeth or wash my face with just a little practice. Later, I learn to raise my hand to answer a question in class by tilting my entire body to one side. In the story's wackiest moment, I discover that my arms make it so I can turn myself into a human tornado by spinning my right stick quickly. There are even a few Mario Party-esque minigames sprinkled into chapters, like one that has me catching falling scoops of ice cream with a cone in each hand. It's a flurry of inventive gameplay ideas that really leaves you to ask why so many games follow the same stale formulas when there are so many ways to approach interactivity.
It's a place where nothing is 'normal,' which also means that it's rarely boring.
That creative spirit does go a little off the rails in the story's back half. The last four chapters trade in pleasant slice of life scenes for left-field bottle episodes starring the story's wider cast of characters. While that does help add some dimension to the world, giving a little spotlight to the child's mother and trusty dog companion, it takes the story in a completely different direction that feels a little more concerned with being surprising than cohesive. Though more damning is that those episodes simply aren't as fun to toy around with as they ditch the imaginative T-shaped gameplay for nearly half of the five hour runtime.
Though I was less engaged during those moments, it's still always enchanting to see the oddball world fully reveal itself. This is a town where kids live out very mundane routines, brushing their teeth and going to gym class every day. That happens in the same breath that they buy lunch from sandwich artist giraffes and get their hair cut by a crab. The story goes to some truly out of this world places, but it never feels at odds with the world Uvula creates here. It's a place where nothing is 'normal,' which also means that it's rarely boring. That's true of the game itself, too.
Grappling with disability
What's more of a struggle for To a T is the well-meaning, but messy conversation about disability that it opens. On a surface level, it treats its subject matter with the level of kindness and sensitivity that it deserves. The protagonist's condition is wacky, but it's approached like a real disability that they've learned to live with. Their life is filled with assistive tools like a unicycle to get around town or a faucet that points up. They have a cute service dog that helps them get dressed in the morning and flush the toilet. They've even figured out how to navigate a world that isn't built with them in mind, knowing how to get through narrow doors by walking through them at an angle. As silly as the visual is at first, these moments are rarely played for laughs long term. Players must learn to adapt to the kid's life experience, hopefully giving them a better understanding of how real people with disabilities move through life.
To a T is too wishy washy about what it actually wants to say.
Those good intentions do eventually butt heads with the story's goofy twists, though. Sometimes it means teetering into tropes that are divisive in the community it portrays. The tornado ability I discover is a fun gameplay idea, but it plays into a hotly debated 'my disability is a superpower' trope as it becomes a tool I use to save the day when no one else can. More problematic is a late game twist that's meant to take the story to one last wacky height, but heavily 'others' its hero in the process. We're repeatedly asked to think of this as your average kid, but later shown that they're anything but. It works too hard to paint them as special instead of normal, a self-defeating decision that's bound to make it divisive.
What I find most frustrating is how much a game that deals with disability doesn't seem terribly interested in making itself broadly playable to that community. There's an accessibility menu in the game, but it only features one single option that makes spinning easier. It's not like the game couldn't have used more options either. The standard button layout occasionally has me twisting my fingers in knots so I can sprint while shining a flashlight or performing other actions. The fixed camera angles occasionally obscure where I am on screen and make it hard to navigate. Plenty of games fail when it comes to accessibility (just look at Blue Prince, which launched without crucial colorblindness options), but it's especially jarring to leave them out of a game where its hero uses assistive tools.
The problem, as I see it, is that To a T is too wishy washy about what it actually wants to say. It uses topics like disability and body image issues interchangeably when those are two very separate discussions. Someone with limited mobility faces specific challenges that aren't fully analogous to someone dealing with bullying over their weight, for instance. The story ultimately arrives at a generalized conclusion about how there's no such thing as perfection and we should celebrate one another for who we are. It makes good on that idea in subtle ways, like choosing to leave its main character as a genderless kid who can be dressed up in any clothing, but the multiple topics it tries to bring together do not call for a one size fits all approach to storytelling.
It's all a little Sesame Street in its approach, boiling everything down to a thin 'we're all just a little different' conclusion that feels insufficient. As clumsy as it may be, though, I can't fault To a T for trying to craft an inclusive story that's delivered with sincerity. It's heartening to see a video game story that centers disability and encourages players to connect with one another's experiences through play. It's not perfect, but nothing is. To a T challenges us to reject the status quo, both in the way it experiments with a well-trodden genre and in its story about embracing our differences. The view out your window is bound to get boring when you see the same thing every day.
To a T was tested on PC.