Katamari Damacy Reroll

My first hour with Katamari Damacy Reroll involved picking up thumbtacks, candy wrappers, and a single panicked mouse, before graduating to rolling up cats, park benches, and eventually whole apartment blocks. That progression from the miniature to the monstrous is the entire game, and it is genuinely one of the most satisfying feedback loops I have encountered outside of a proper action-RPG. The premise is straightforward: the King of All Cosmos drunkenly destroyed every star in the sky, and he has sent his tiny son the Prince down to Earth to fix the mess by rolling a sticky ball called a katamari over literally everything until it grows large enough to be launched into orbit as a new celestial body. It is absurd. It is also completely legible in about thirty seconds. The core mechanic works off a dual-stick scheme where both analog sticks drive the katamari the way two hands push a real ball: push both forward to roll straight, use them in opposition to turn. It is tank-like and deliberately unwieldy, and that resistance is not a flaw. As the katamari swells from centimeters to kilometers the weight of the controls starts to feel appropriate, like you genuinely are trying to maneuver a growing moon through a suburban neighborhood. Keyboard play is a different story. The WASD-and-IJKL layout is technically functional but fights you at every turn, and the community consensus is clear: plug in a controller, full stop. Beyond the main Make a Star and Make the Moon missions, there are constellation side missions where you hunt for specific objects, like stuffing as many fish-related items onto your ball as possible for a Pisces stage. There are also three unlockable Eternal modes tied to size milestones in specific levels, which strip away the timer and let you roll indefinitely, great for completionists chasing every listed object or anyone who just wants to zone out to the soundtrack. And the soundtrack deserves its own paragraph. The mix of jazzy vocal tracks, upbeat J-pop, and loose orchestral cues is one of the most distinctly pleasurable audio packages in any remaster from this era, and the updated HD cutscenes, recreated from scratch rather than simply upscaled, hold up well alongside it. The visuals are bright and blocky by design, and while the assets do show their PS2 origins, the art direction is confident enough that it reads as intentional style rather than technical limitation. The port is barebones, though. Gameplay animations are capped at 30 fps. The game launches windowed at 720p and locks you out of every graphics option until you complete the tutorial and first level, which is the kind of PS2-era holdover that should have been patched out. There is no autosave, so getting into the habit of manually saving after each level is a real requirement, not a suggestion. The total runtime sits around five hours for a clean clear, which has historically made the price a point of contention in Steam reviews. The game is short and changes very little about the 2004 original beyond the visual refresh. Whether that feels like a fair trade depends on how much you value the concept itself. For newcomers, this is the only way to play the original Katamari on PC without hunting down PS2 hardware, and the game's logic is singular enough that no other title on any platform really fills the same role. Donut County comes close in spirit but has none of the scale. For series returnees, Reroll is a faithful reproduction, possibly too faithful in the spots where the original showed its rough edges, but the underlying design remains as curious and playful as it ever was.

Alex · Scout Team

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