To a T, the latest game from Katamari Damacy series creator Keita Takahashi, is a truly beautiful and uniquely baffling experience, that days after completion I am still struggling to land on solid feelings about.
I think I largely really like it, there’s just a few things that complicate that.
At times it lands incredibly well as an allegorical tale about living with disability, other times it feels like it reinforces negative stereotypes about exceptionalism being the only way that a disabled person might gain social acceptance, and at other points it puts all of that aside to lean into Takahashi’s signature style of space influenced surrealism, backed by beautiful music from Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar that has far less of a bearing on the direction of the plot than I anticipated.
At its core, To a T is a roughly five hour long third-person adventure game where you play Teen (a nameable player character), a 13 year old whose arms have since birth been extended horizontally outward from their body, resembling a “T-Pose”.
Early portions of the game focus on Teen’s daily life living with a disability, and while clearly designed to be a little exaggerated, these early sections do lean into the realities of independent living as a disabled teenager, and the importance of tools and accommodations to help maintain a sense of independence.
Teen has a dog who helps them get dressed in the morning. They eat their cereal with an elongated spoon that reaches from their outstretched hand to their mouth. They use a specially adapted tap in the bathroom to wash their eyes in the morning without needing to use their hands to get the water to their face, and their dog helps them to apply toothpaste to their brush before they clean their teeth.
Starting each in-game day with this daily routine of minigames, all of which crucially do not involve being reliant on their mother’s support, builds a compelling portrait of a young adult eager for independence and a sense of control in a world clearly not built around their needs. I appreciate that the game doesn’t shy away from topics like independence when using the bathroom for example, a topic often treated as taboo by non disabled individuals, but often an important part of life for people with various disabilities.
Generally speaking, I think a lot of the runtime of To a T does a pretty good job of balancing depicting life with a disability as a life that faces unique barriers, but that isn’t constantly defined by those barriers. Teen has accommodations in place that allow them to function independently, but when those accommodations are taken away that sense of independence is also quickly removed. The emphasis is on accessibility accommodations as specifically vital for allowing disabled people autonomy and independence, as tools and support structures that liberate rather than restrict, and that is one of the things that I think this game most effectively handles.
To discuss lightly one small narrative element from later in the game to provide emphasis, there is a portion of this game where Teen and their dog are briefly separated. During this time not only does Teen struggle directly to maintain their independence, but also they clearly struggle emotionally with the idea of having to rely on their mother for support when they’d prided themselves previously on not needing to. They go out looking for their dog while still in their PJs, because getting dressed for the day would require needing help from their mum to get changed, a moment of lost independence that they’re not ready to accept.
To a T’s narrative is delivered in episodic chapters, each with an opening theme song introduction, and emphasising the ways that Teen’s routine has to change when lacking the support of their service animal in that episode’s introduction is one of the more striking ways that the game reinforces its themes.
I also really appreciate the game’s choice to have a brief section where you get to play as Teen’s service dog, navigating supporting their daily routine while not understanding the actual words being said to you. Testing the player’s understanding of a practiced morning routine, and remembering the variables that might be important, does a great job of representing the close relationship between the pair, and how they ultimately understand each other’s experiences. It reinforces that you don’t need to be able to verbally communicate to share a loving relationship, and gives the dog a really sweet interior lived experience.
I do, however, feel that there is one element of To a T’s plot that potentially weakens its applicability as a story about living with a disability – It potentially falls into the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer school of discussing life with a visible difference from your community.
I’m sure most of you reading this will have seen this critique made of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer before – The idea that the story reinforces the idea that it’s okay to be different as long as that difference is useful to others around you. If your difference is beneficial to others it will be enough to make those who previously bullied you now love you and embrace you as a valid part of the group.
This idea exists in how we discuss and tell stories about humans with disabilities too, in the form of exceptionalism discourse. This looks different for different types of disabled people, but it might look like a gaming news site posting about a blind Street Fighter player proving everyone wrong to win a tournament in the face of their detractors, or a story about an autistic savant using their incredible pattern recognition skills to recognise an issue that specialists hadn’t yet discovered. It’s the highlighting of exceptionally talented disabled individuals in stories that inherently set expectations that every disabled person could be exceptional if they tried hard enough, and if someone is just “regular disabled” they’re not doing enough to be one of the good, useful, successful ones.
To a T, as a central concept, centres around the idea that Teen’s arms being stuck out horizontally is actually secretly a superpower, one that’s directly beneficial to their peers. This aspect of the plot isn’t a secret, it comes up early, it’s discussed in the game’s episodic intro song “You Are The Perfect Shape”. If teen is able to spin fast enough they are able to fly into the air, a superpower born from their disability.
I think the reason I feel so conflicted about this aspect of the story is how it’s used to hand wave away bigotry, bullying, and discrimination from much of Teen’s story. Sure, Teen is anxious to go to school early on in the plot, they experience bullying for being different – for maybe two days at most. Their super power is able to help save one of their bullies from harm, protecting them from injury. Suddenly the bullies want to be Teen’s friend and have no instinct to bully them anymore.
The bullies are actually very nice people and loving, trustworthy friends, so long as your disability is useful enough to them that they stop seeing you as weird and instead see you as beneficial.
If you can make yourself exceptional as a disabled person in a way that puts you above bullying and harassment, more power to you. But in a simplistic cartoonish story about living with a disability, I have really mixed feelings about presenting the idea that your bullies will stop bullying you and decide to be your friend if you can simply find a superpower that makes your disability useful to them.
In reality, things rarely go this way. I know from personal experience. As a teenager I used to do homework for my bullies because I was academically gifted, for a time. I thought that would make them stop bullying me and be my friends. Instead, they decided that I now had to do their work for them, it wasn’t an optioonal treat I was doing on their behalf. I had to do it or the bullying would escalate. It didn’t make them become my friends, it made them realise they had even more to gain from continuing to bully me.
Sure, that won’t be the case for everyone, but it’s in part why I feel so conflicted about this aspect of the game’s plot.
There is a small portion of To a T that removes Teen’s ability to fly, and in many ways this portion of the game felt the most grounded in its exploration of disability. By removing the more fantastical element of flight from the story briefly I felt very little was lost, and the story was perhaps most in tune with its own strengths.
Then, we have the third act of the game, the point where everything gets… quite frankly bonkers. I’m not going to delve into plot specifics for the game’s third act. I will however state that the third act gets really, really surreal in how it explores answering the game’s largest questions. The best way I can describe the third act is that it feels like you asked The King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy to lead a lecture exploring the topic of eugenics, imperfections, and the value we derive as humanity from little things that on paper should be undesirable.
It’s at times beautiful, at times messy, and at times baffling.
The matter of Teen’s parentage I still don’t know quite how to process.
Taking a step back to more broadly discuss To a T, I did experience some accessibility issues while playing the game. There were some visually overstimulating white flashes around the edge of the screen, some text was set to auto play and could not be changed to progress only on button presses, and I experienced some motion sickness caused by automated camera movement. The camera automatically swings to predefined angles as you turn corners in the game world which is a common motion sickness trigger at the best of times, taking camera movement away from me as the player. This is made considerably worse in the section of the game where you play as the dog, where the lower to the ground camera angle and more frequent camera angle changes as you run through tunnels only exacerbated these motion sickness issues.
I come away from my time playing To a T conflicted on how I ultimately feel about it. I think my overall feelings are largely positive, but I realistically want to play through the game a second time, knowing what’s coming, to work out how I feel about the game’s leaning on exceptionalism as an escape from prejudice, and some of the wilder swings taken in the game’s final act.
There is a LOT to love about To a T. I think it captures the experience of trying to live an independent life in a world not designed for you with beautiful accuracy, care, grace, and humour. It captures the life of a teenager who knows they are disabled, but has learned to thrive, laugh, and love who they are. It captures the experience of finding accessible accommodations that help you to feel a little more normal, and the crushing weight of having to struggle without those accommodations when you need them. It wrestles with the conflict of having to wrestle with your own lessening autonomy, while not feeling bogged down by those feelings. It is a beautiful game, if at times baffling, and at other times a little too focused on being that special kind of disabled where actually it’s a cool superpower that people will find useful and exciting enough not to treat you like those weird, useless disabled people.