a katamari-like from the actual katamari devs; more specifically the Now Production jobbers who toiled to get keita takahashi's vision off the ground back on the original titles, although many of the devs on this particular title were johnny-come-latelies who started on beautiful katamari. munchables twists the "roll up stuff, get bigger, roll up bigger stuff" loop from katamari into a game all about eating, where your mute spherical protagonists chomp through waves of pirate/alien/frankenfood creations, getting progressively larger after each set of meals. your character's size is unambiguously labeled with a level number, with enemies larger than yourself having a similar label to illustrate who exactly you can eat at any given point. these larger enemies can be bumped with a dash attack that splits them into smaller enemies, although if the difference between you and the enemy is vast enough, each of their component sub-enemies may still be larger than you. interesting systemic element here, where due to the split being an equal amount every time, you can decompose an enemy multiple times, eat a select number of sub-enemies, wait for them to recombine into a slightly smaller enemy than before, and then break them once again to get a set of sub-enemies you can scoop up all at once.

this plays into the other mechanic: chaining. eating an enemy starts an implicit chain timer that replenishes with each additional enemy eaten; when the timer expires, the number of meals counted from enemies eaten during the chain will more or less double. a cute idea in theory, although you may be able to see how that breaks any thought involved with above decomposition mechanic: more at once is always better, so split big enemies into as many sub-enemies as possible every time you see them. however, in the first real levels (in the second world) you can see how this still ends up having that katamari flair to it. a large arena of different zones, each locked behind edible barriers with level requirements, where you can freely navigate across zones and backtrack to your heart's content. similar to how katamari lets the player reason about the optimal size to grab a set of items at once, here you can plan inter-zone chains by carefully planning your feeding route to give you just enough food to bypass barriers while leaving plenty of enemies on the field to grab in a single swoop.

if that was the game it would probably be pretty good; there's a buffer-able, charge-able dash chomp you can use to link enemies in a chain, so there's a comfortable rhythm to the experience that negates the otherwise ho-hum movement. unfortunately, the level designers got antsy and started actually designing some levels. the progression quickly devolves into linear gauntlets, jettisoning the potential for inter-zone chains and replacing it with quick bursts of enemies with ample downtime in between. these in-between sections get muddled with switch "puzzles" and other tired gimmicks that continually throw the katamari loop out the window. the aforementioned issue with chaining gets exacerbated here, because there's never a reason to not decompose big enemies as soon as you see them, so the linearity of the levels becomes even more apparent. when the game veers into actual platforming it's even more appalling: there's virtually no mechanics here to support that outside of some mild air stalling whenever you chomp. much more tedious than it has any right to be.