There's something genuinely special about how Wattam presents itself. Children of all shapes and sizes, coming together and understanding each other through the impromptu act of play. Not even a language barrier can prevent them from settling disagreements or making friends. As it turns out, fun is a universal language.
The game just wants you to have enjoy yourself. It even refrains from dropping achievements until you've closed the game, so as to not take your focus away from the experience.

That experience...sure is something.

The controls feel like the biggest obstacle to this being a universal experience. Climbing is initiated by hugging up against another character, something that can happen purely on accident as you're just trying to move around, or is almost guaranteed to happen when you're surrounded by other characters. Selecting other characters is mapped to the right stick, an awkward choice that always had me swapping two or more times before I finally reached the one I wanted to control. This also means that camera control is mapped elsewhere, on the triggers specifically, and limited to the x-axis. Holding hands is a seamless action, but getting everyone together for a big hand-holding circle is understandably cumbersome. None of this detracts too hard from the laid-back nature of the game, but it did get on my nerves a couple times.

The presentation has "Keita Takahashi" written all over it. Everyone's got the same, simplistic, doofy face, and soft rounded edges. You greet everyone in this game with a tip of your hat and a KABOOM. The circle of life is self>fruit>poop>self. Flush yourself down the toilet if you want to become golden. I don't make the rules, Keita Takahashi does. Every single controllable being has their own weird bio to read in the collection, and dynamically adds their own little melody with their own instruments to the background music while you're moving them around. The jaunty piano and acapella vocals of the title theme provided the most welcoming atmosphere I've experienced in a game in a long time.

It feels weird to say that the story is probably the highlight of this game for me. Its lessons are simple, but easy to forget, particularly by today's society. It can be hard to apologize, difficult to forgive, and impossible to forget. But it's important to cherish what we have. You can never anticipate when it might up and leave your life, or if it'll ever return. These things may never truly be the same, but we still move forward regardless.

And that's how I'm ending this review: by moving on, and keeping the good memories close to my heart. Looking forward to "To a T", and whatever else comes out of Keita Takahashi's head after that.