Over a decade has passed since developer Keita Takahashi's first major work in surrealist game design. Katamari Damacy – a glorious fever dream of the PlayStation 2 era which was recently named one of the Guardian's 50 best video games of the 21st century – helped cement Takahashi as a connoisseur of the delightfully wacky. Now, six games and two console generations later, the game designer has released the latest in his absurdist oeuvre. Like the Katamari series, Wattam features a similarly eccentric universe and cast of characters. But unlike its predecessors, Wattam's eccentricities fail to help it overcome extremely repetitive gameplay.

The Mayor, a green cube with a top hat, goes "kaboom" in Wattam. The Mayor, a green cube with a top hat, goes "kaboom" in Wattam. The video game designer Keita Takahashi is best known for Katamari Damacy, released in 2004. It's about a god named the "King of All Cosmos" who, while drunk, accidentally destroys the stars in the sky. His son "The Prince" is left to clean up his mess by rolling up objects on Earth into sticky masses that grow so large they become new stars.

Keita Takahashi is an unusual video game designer. His breakout hit, Katamari Damacy, was about picking up objects with an increasingly large, sticky ball. He then made Noby Noby Boy, a game about a colorful, worm-like creature that can stretch around animals, houses and planets. Now, the artist is working on Wattam, a light-hearted puzzle game about a little green mayor and his quest to find a group of long-lost friends. At E3 2018, I played a brief demo with Takahashi as my helpful guide.