You are a thirteen year old stuck in the shape of a T, arms aloft forever – what do you do? Well, in To A T, you simply go on living your everyday life. This kid-friendly town explorer is both a low-stakes comic adventure and a commentary on living contentedly with a disability despite daily struggles. As the only T-posing kid in school, you are also the target of three bullies, whose mockery and mimickry give your teen pause before heading out the door to school. This is mainly a story of how those bullies come to understand your troubles and appreciate some of your more far-fetched abilities (turns out spinning very fast allows you to fly, like a helicopter – who knew!) But it also takes a dip into truly silly territory, becoming more of an outlandish movie and less of an actual “game” as things go on.
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Mostly what all this looks like is a third-person walkabout with a lot of minigame-style movement challenges. Many of which encourage playfulness even in mundane tasks. You could spit your toothpastey water straight into the sink after rinsing in the morning. Or you could rotate your head around and splash it everywhere. You could point the TV remote at the telly to “spin it up” (the magical TV literally spins until it turns on) or you could direct the dooter’s beam of energy at the bookshelves and knock down all your mum’s photographs and novels. Up to you.
In school you might be asked to combine chemicals in science class, which’ll take you tilting arms into the air with the joysticks, or hitting shoulder buttons to shake up the beakers. In gym class you might have to follow rhythm game inputs, or run as fast as you can across the football field by holding down a button to charge up speed. There’s no penalty for not being able to complete some task, and the game often asks if you want to keep trying, or just continue and skip the minigame in question.
Some freedom quickly opens up – you get a unicycle to wander around town more speedily. The coins scattered in bushes and hidden in corners can be spent at clothes shops, shoe stores, and hairdressers to kit your teen out with new pairs of asymmetrical jeans, dungarees, stripey socks, and trendy shorts.
The structure is not as open as an equivalent cosy game, mind. You’re free to explore some days, yet more often confined to follow the story. It never blossoms into freeform antics of a day-by-day kid’s summer. This isn’t Persona for pre-teens, or some modern Boku no Natsuyasumi. It fits squarely into a mould of a pre-ordained adventure with side activities, clothes shops, and haircut collecting (you go around observing people’s unusual hair styles and cataloguing them for a crustacean barber on the beach – he is called “Crabbiano”).
It’s also a story told with the episodic rhythms of a kid’s TV show. Characters, including your teen, will repeatedly look straight down the camera and address the player. Everyone speaks with Simlish-style wibbletalk. The action will sometimes break to repeat a catchy ditty by a dancing giraffe. Every episode starts with the game’s theme song, and gets its own title emblazoned in bubble writing. “A Day To Practice” or “A Fun Day At School” or “A Day For Dog’s Adventures”.
Games made expressly for kids like this are rare. And even rarer are ones with this kind of unexpected warmth and humour. There are some joyful musical variations, from a funeral organ that plays during your teen’s first heel-dragging march to school (black crows lining the way) to that jazzy giraffe’s sandwich song. Familiar melodies repeat themselves throughout in a variety of instruments and styles in a way that gives each lil bop new energy.
You can often press a button while walking around to summon a thought bubble from your teen.
The episodes throw small tasks and adventures at you constantly. You’ll race trains, ride your talking unicycle, eat a giant corn on the cob, and visit a forest full of magical mushrooms. But there’s also an ongoing mystery from episode to episode. Something strange is happening in town. And exactly why are all the hand-me-downs from your teen’s absent father so endowed with magical abilities? The answers come, although later episodes get so caught up in giving you those answers that they forget to let you play a game at all, becoming instead one long animation of backstory.
Still, it’s a friendly, warm game for kids, or for fans of Keita Takahashi’s style of playfulness (the lead designer here is the same person who made Noby Noby Boy and Katamari Damacy). It is often unfair to you on purpose, putting people in your way during a race, forcing failure upon your T-posing kid in a way that can still be overcome with some patience. It has myriad little touches. Like the way your teen’s hand will bend at the wrist when your arms collide or drag along any surface. The pause menu – in certain places – is a lovable sight. Hit pause and birds will swoop in and perch on your arms, each bird representing a different option on the menu. At various moments in each episode, a chorus of three invisible onloookers will show up to comment on your ongoing antics.
Edwin recently wrote a preview about fumblecore third-person waddler Baby Steps, in which he talks about how a game’s controls can remind us of our bumbling bodily reality, rather than abstracting it to the point of acrobatic superhumanity. “In most games,” he wrote, “the player is permitted only to savour the ‘hero moves’, like punches and dodges, and rarely the smaller or less purposeful idiosyncracies of the flesh, the fumbles and frolics of inexpertly wielded matter.”
I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot as I finished To A T (it clocks in at about 4-5 hours). It is full of moments when the controls change, and you must move them in some new way to brush your teeth, eat food, or whirl like a ballerina. The immediacy of game controls is something that necessarily gets lost the further this game travels into it’s almost entirely non-playable final episode. But it otherwise resists the trappings of modern games that remove us from that body-to-button feeling. There’s no cluttered UI or silly systems of meta-progression. Like other games by the same creators, To A T understands that the most basic unit of wonder games can offer is still: press button to move shapes.