Games can be a great tool for getting through hard times, and at this moment it feels like the times couldn’t be harder. The current social, political, and economic climate is more than enough to send any one of us down a dark spiral. Of course, life has a way of piling on and, in my case, it came in the form of a concerning diagnosis.
I am still waiting on more tests, but after years of searching for the source of some elevated blood levels we have figured out that I have a mold in my body and brain. While I’m already on a treatment plan, hearing that you have a foreign pathogen in your brain isn’t exactly comforting. My natural instinct was to turn to games to help get me through this low point and restore some hope. I typically like to pick games that directly attack the issues I’m dealing with in real life as a way to work through them. In this case, I considered going back to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth to revisit Kiryu’s approach to mortality, but thought that might be a bit too overdramatic. The Last of Us also came to mind, but mostly as a dark joke considering my specific condition.
In the end, I chose a game that had just come to PlayStation Plus but had never played before. We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie turned out to be exactly what I needed to get out of my own head for a day.
We love Katamari
Learning that there’s an invader inside your head infects every part of your life. A fungus growing in my guts, I could deal with, but my brain? That, pardon the pun, is something I just couldn’t get out of my head. The only reason I have been able to hang on to my sanity at all is because it isn’t fatal — this isn’t a tumor or cancer. In that way, it almost feels unfair to complain. Still, after my morning exercise on Saturday and having an empty day ahead of me, I could feel a heaviness starting to set in.
Normally, work would be my refuge. That sounds unhealthy — and it probably is to some extent — but I am in the extremely privileged position where I can work through personal issues in my writing as you are seeing here. I didn’t have that luxury over the weekend and needed something else to redirect my thoughts. Games would be my natural go-to, but I didn’t want anything too challenging or narratively driven in that state of mind. I needed something comfortable and easy to get into.
Enter We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie.
While I had never played a Katamari game before, I certainly knew it from its reputation. The gameplay of rolling up objects to grow your Katamari to pick up even bigger objects seemed like exactly the type of mind-off experience I was craving. While it can be that, I appreciated how oddly optimistic the game was. As familiar as I was with the core mechanics and design of the Prince and King, what was new and surprising to me was the framing of it all.
I had skipped the intro cutscene in an effort to enjoy the game on a raw gameplay level, but read through the four or five lines that proceeded each level. At first I took these as borderline nonsensical excuses for why I was rolling a big ball of junk in various locations, but started to notice a theme after a few. Each fan in the game handing out levels had a problem or dream they needed help achieving. They were all silly and quite unserious, but I found myself admiring how the game was able to apply the single solution of rolling up objects to anything from making friends to becoming an Olympic swimmer. I could’ve so easily been turned off by such a naively optimistic take on the world, yet found myself eating it up. I didn’t realize until then that I had been starved of any kind of uncompromising positivity for who knows how long.
Katamari paints a world where no problems are too big to overcome with some effort and help. But more than that, the Katamari itself was never what those people needed. Time and time again, they would let the Katamari go into the cosmos to become a star or planet. It is overly idyllic, saccharine, and innocent, sure, but it invited me to live in that mindset for a few hours. I, too, could get through this minor crisis if I just kept rolling.
I didn’t take away any big revelations or new perspectives on my life or the world around me by playing We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie. It was a purely vibes-based experience for me, and that was perfect. If I really wanted to, sure, I could try and find some greater commentary that the game’s story was communicating, or what the gameplay of rolling a ball just to make a bigger ball could be saying. The one poignant level I couldn’t help but read into was the last one. Here, a meteor is crashing towards Earth and I had to roll up all the countries on the planet to intercept it. The concept of a world coming together against armageddon was inspiring at first, but soured just hours later after I returned to reality and saw the latest news.
While it did end on a slightly dour note, for me on that Saturday, just having a bright and colorful game about rolling around a big ball of junk was exactly what I needed.
