Keita Takahashi’s newest game, To a T, is as awkward as its T-posing 13-year old protagonist. For as much charm as this slice-of-life adventure game can muster—and to be clear, it gets a lot of points between the opening and ending songs that bookend every chapter—it still just barely manages to get off the ground. Though I’m left with faintly good memories of my time with Teen, Dog, and company as they dart around their whimsical town full of odd figures, most of To a T is unfortunately relegated to thinly padded gameplay sequences patched together by similarly thin writing. Altogether, it’s a well-intentioned misfire.
It’s a shame, because Takahashi has become a name synonymous with out-there premises welded onto simplistic but nonetheless engaging mechanical romps—most notably Katamari Damacy. However, if I had to point to a core failing of To a T, it’s how little mechanical depth there is to any of it. I often felt detached from the action of the game and its story of learning to love one’s unique self because it fell short of giving me anything to chew on. I needed something to bond me to Teen, drop me into their shoes, and make me sympathize with their journey and position. I never quite felt like I got there.
At the beginning of To a T, you run through Teen’s daily routine. With their arms permanently pointed outward like an airplane, it’s hard to imagine how they do it everyday. Thankfully, with the aid of Dog, who will pick out Teen’s clothes and help them with their trousers in order to use the bathroom, as well as their mother’s innovations—including a specially engineered sink faucet and an extra long spoon—it seems pretty manageable. Rather than start at the beginning of the arduous journey, To a T plops us down firmly at its end, at which point life as Teen knows it is pretty simple and straightforward. Almost idyllic, even.
There’s a rich enough premise here for a neat little puzzle platformer, which To a T almost seems like it was meant to be. Finding bizarre solutions to puzzles on some kind of larger-than-life adventure (a thing the end of the game teases and brusquely brushes past) that make clear the significance of Teen’s unique shape feels like it would’ve aligned more with the story To a T attempts to tell for the first half of its five-hour runtime. But with everything already figured out for the player, there’s little to do but engage with the game on a kind of autopilot.
I’m trying not to knock To a T for what it isn’t, but in contrast to what it is, a boy can dream. Even by comparison to other adventure games, like Night in the Woods, there’s just very little here. You can go around collecting coins to spend at the local stores or biking from one end of town to another, but there’s nothing at the end of those pursuits. There are a number of “races,” if you’d even call them that, a handful of food-centric mini games, and you eventually unlock the ability to (kind of) fly, but the implementation of these game-y mechanics and sequences often feel hamstrung and half-baked.
Even running around and interacting with the townsfolk, like a human-sized pigeon known as DJ Pigeon, feels pretty shallow, and to complement that frustration, I felt like I was constantly warring against the game’s unwieldy camera. It became disappointingly clear early on how little there is to cling to here.
Despite my woes, I enjoyed a handful of moments across my playthrough, largely thanks to To a T‘s presentation. As I’ve already mentioned, beginning and ending every episode of the game (a moment frequently denoted by a fourth-wall break addressing numbered balloons around town) on a recurring musical segment just feels quintessentially charming. This small gesture lends the chapters the framing of an episode in a children’s show, a not-insignificant way to view and examine To a T. It’s a perspective that softens some, if not all, of its rough edges, while still illuminating its shortcomings.
When I think of children’s shows, I think of the call-and-response. I think of shows like Dora The Explorer, and how they prompted me as a kid to think through possible solutions to the problems the main characters faced. I was asked to consider the tools in front of us and figure out a way forward. To a T, despite its facile nature and writing, never has a similar moment. It’s cloying and pacifying instead.
Along To a T‘s awkward journey across the finish line, this writing continually crops up to cut the game off at the knee. The first half of the game is firmly dedicated to the kind of narrative you’d expect: Teen is anxious about their standing with others in their life due to their shape and wishes to be accepted. Except… they kind of are already. Giraffe, a local vendor and matriarch, makes them a sandwich every day before school. Teen may occasionally bump against someone on the road due to their odd shape, but nobody really goes out of their way to ostracize, mock, or exclude them, save for a handful of bullies in precisely one sequence before they immediately befriend Teen.
The fact that To a T begins on Teen’s 13th birthday, an especially crucial and agonizing inflection point in the life of a kid, means that it tries to drill home this kind of lack of acceptance from the wider world, but the game never quite backs it up in writing. You’re meant to think Teen is kind of adrift and alone, and that there’s an ugliness keeping him from belonging, with one-off lines referencing war, race, and the wider world’s historical penchant for cruelty, but Teen never faces anything even remotely like these real conflicts.
I recall facing more adversity and mockery over being an overweight teen in skinny jeans than Teen ever really gets for being T-shaped. Which isn’t to say that I need To a T to be more vicious; it is, after all, a game pointed at children first and foremost, and I do relish its overwhelming kindness. But to return to the children’s show analog, those are willing to go to uncomfortable places to communicate impactful lessons to a young and impressionable audience. To a T tries and fails to render conflict from its premise, robbing the barebones story of any real direction and deflates To a T‘s promise. By extension, the writing just kind of hangs until an entirely different and nonsensical storyline towards the end thinly, but sweetly, ties it all back together in the end.
It’s a bumpy landing, leaving a lot to be desired from Takahashi’s latest flight of fancy. Its overarching theme of acceptance is well-meaning, even if the game built upon it feels slapdash. And yet, one of the lines near the end of To a T keeps bouncing around in my head. “I think there’s something more important than this perfection you’re talking about.” To a T may stumble more than I care for, but there is something admirable in what it intends, and maybe that means more than the end result.
To a T was developed by uvula and published by Annapurna Interactive. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.
