to a T Review: Charmed And Whelmed | Off The Radar

Available on: Steam, Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC (what this was played on), PlayStation 5

Price: $19.99 USD, Demo available

Release date: May 28th, 2025

Developer, publisher: uvula, Annapurna Interactive

Prior works: Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure

It doesn’t feel right to be in a world where a new Keita Takahashi game came and went under most people’s noses. Sometimes I get it, his most recent title released for the intentionally niche Playdate handheld a few years back. However, with ‘to a T’ we’re talking his first console game since 2019’s ‘WATTAM’. The title does seem a bit hard to Google, perhaps there’s more of a problem here than mere word of mouth. I can barely even find the game’s incredibly catchy theme song on YouTube even with “video game” modifiers added to the search. After finishing the game and settling my opinions on it, I did look around to see what others felt. Unfortunately, many of us seem to be in the same boat. A tepid spot of “this is still worth experiencing, it’s just missing that something special that we expected.”

‘to a T’ is a cute experience that lacks interesting mechanics to engage with. Most of its tricks tied to “Teen”, your playable character stuck in a T-pose, are spent within the first chapter of the game’s 5 hour playthrough. When not simply walking around, the analog sticks will let you move one of Teen’s arms forward and the shoulder button will let you grab an item with a pretty generous allowance for space and distance. You’ll grab a long spoon or toothbrush, hold a sandwich up to your mouth and use the left shoulder button to bite at it, or sometimes simply pet Dog’s head. (“Teen” and “Dog” can be given custom names, just so you know).

Compounding the simplicity of these tasks is that many of them are merely routine. Teen wakes up, Dog helps them put on clothes, you have breakfast, wash your face, brush your teeth, then grab your bag and shoes and head to the next point of interest to advance the narrative. A few points in the story have you skip these tasks for various reasons, but a lot of time in game is spent merely running or riding a talking unicycle (it’s fine, don’t worry about it) around to the next story beat.

These short stints of novelty “minigames” are mostly to punctuate those story beats. Without giving much away, things like bullying and absentee fathers are very lightly touched on…but in a very plain way where things just tend to work themselves out in a wholesome fashion. I suspect some hoped that ‘to a T’ would have more to say about disabilities (particularly with the Able Gamers credit that the game has) but aside from some surface level gestures to difficulties there isn’t much. Even the Accessibility menu only has one single option which feels bizarre no matter how you look at it. Kind of like everything else here, it just didn’t go as far as I would have expected it to.

Still, there’s a fair bit of cute dialog from Teen and the cast of characters around the seaside town they all inhabit. Particular standouts for me are “Giraffe”, one of four giraffes that run food stands all called “Giraffe”, “DJ Pigeon”, who is not a DJ, and a science teacher that keeps getting rejected by women in town. He sounds like Dr. Otto Scratchansniff from ‘Animaniacs’, and that alone was enough to make me laugh every time he popped up.

Unfortunately, his name has slipped my mind (I was recording gameplay footage and can confirm that his name is Mr. Mushroom). That isn’t his fault, my memory just isn’t great on details sometimes. As mentioned earlier, this game is difficult to Google and granular info is difficult to find. So, I opened my game to go talk to him and remember his name, but unfortunately my save file seems to have been swallowed whole. I’m not sure if I simply closed the game while it was trying to save, or if I can chalk this up as another technical issue I encountered. No issue was too egregious in a vacuum, but these quirks did add up over my short time with the game. Chief among them was an issue with a “spinjump” mechanic introduced a couple hours in. By twirling around you can fly up into the sky (like the theme song proclaims), but sometimes only by mashing the button a lot.

uvula seems to be aware of this and is working on a patch as I write this, though it seems like quite a widespread issue so I’m surprised it released in this state. It seems there’s some collision detection issue; on staircases you can fly up with no problem, but on flat surfaces all there is to do at the moment is hope the game eventually gives you mercy. The latest patch accidentally introduced an invisible wall to a cave entrance accessible at the end of the game. This blocks off an unlockable hairstyle for Teen, making the game unable to be completed Achievement-wise at this point in time. Finally, somehow this game is quite demanding on my Nvidia 3070. I know this isn’t the most powerful card in the land, but this isn’t the most detailed game visually or presumably under the hood either. Running ‘to a T’ on “High” through its very basic graphic settings kicked me up to about 80% usage very often. Other quirks were present, like Teen sometimes getting stuck for a few seconds while trying to open a door because Dog isn’t close enough to walk through at the same time. Or landing in a “wrong” spot after flying and getting stuck in geometry.

Nothing here is so ridiculously broken or beyond repair, but when I was already having just a “good enough” time it did routinely take me out of the experience. Truthfully, I wish the issue with flying was more of a bother, but very rarely is it worth exploring vertically or even required to progress. When it is required the function does tend to function, granted, but even when it isn’t you’ll mostly just find more Hospa, the in-game currency. MAYBE you’ll find an oddball character, but it’s very rare. With Hospa you can buy new clothes for Teen and some funny hats for Dog, or give a few to Giraffe to attempt a minigame. As silly as it is to say, the in-game economy is broken. I think it’s intentional.

See, the minigames cost a paltry sum to play, but to buy all of the clothes you’ll need a few million Hospa. For reference, most of the coins around town are worth 100 Hospa. There is one gold variant by the beach that gives you 1000 and maybe due to a glitch respawns every few seconds so you can stand there and rack it up…but you have a hard limit of 99,999 carried at a time. I don’t think you’re expected to actually buy every clothing item in the game, so for most this isn’t an issue. However…if you want all of the Achievements then you’ll need to buy every single item. I’ll put it this way, using this potential glitch to max out my Hospa count and run back and forth to the shops took me hours. I caught up on so many podcasts and YouTube videos. Just standing and letting the money pour in and zipping back and forth. It was numbing. I can’t imagine doing this “legitimately” by just going around and gaining moolah through exploring. It almost feels like a joke, and maybe it is.

So losing my save where I spent hours on that and had one hairstyle left that I couldn’t get due to a glitch soured my experience some. There’s no denying that. Even as I separate that out, however, ‘to a T’ is still a game that gets by just OK enough on its charm. I sat down to make this episode thinking I’d end up more positive, but as each day passed over the last week I really struggled to convey how I felt while still recommending the game. After all, if I wasn’t going to recommend it then why do this at all when the point is to recommend games?

Where I settled on was that a fair bit of the issue was merely in managing my own expectations. This was actually one of the games I was most anticipating this year. The first two ‘Katamari Damacy’ games under Keita Takahashi speak for themselves as gaming classics, and ‘Noby Noby Boy’ and ‘WATTAM” both are so bizarre that I can’t help but be fascinated by them. There’s just nothing else out there like them. I knew to expect something a bit more “traditional” here but even with that in mind I just feel it doesn’t go as far as I’d hoped. That’s even keeping in mind the swerves ‘to a T’ makes in its back half. I still think the game is worth going through, but I’d caution my fellow Keita sickos to know they’re in for a simple, subdued adventure game here. I could see this game being great for parents and kids to poke at together, I suspect that’s where this may create the best memories. Either way I just don’t want this game to have completely come and gone despite my mixed conclusion and tepid recommendation. No matter what, both vocal songs made for this game are lovely and I’m glad it exists just for those. I’m hoping to revisit ‘to a T’ down the road and have a warmer takeaway, but in the meantime I’ll cross my fingers that if you check it out you’ll find something about it to really appreciate.

‘Off The Radar’ is available on Beehiiv in text and audio form, on your podcast service of choice, and will be delivered early to my Patreon supporters when no embargoes are in the way. Speaking of, a special thanks to Adrian, Buckles Chucklo, Harry Baker, Hiro, James Boss, GoldStorm07, Svendelica, Jeet, TheCrazyEven, Patrick Thompson, and Cooking Mama for their support.