2023 has been a bumper 12 months for followers of Keita Takahashi’s Katamari, probably the most singular sport sequence ever made, which lately noticed the perfect entry launched on Steam. Katamari is about rolling stuff up right into a ball because the Prince of All Cosmos beneath the watchful eye of disapproving daddy The King of All Cosmos, and begins small-scale with you rolling up paperclips and erasers and fruit, earlier than scaling into vehicles and timber and finally complete metropolis blocks. Might sound a bit bizarre however what this all provides as much as can solely be described as a honest and touching ode to the fun of play and childhood innocence (actually).
It is a particular sport, and somebody at Google clearly loves it as a lot as I do.
Google has integrated a Katamari minigame into its omnipresent search engine: you can begin rolling a ball across the search outcomes web page, step by step growing the ball’s dimension with textual content and buttons earlier than sticking on issues like the photographs. It is a little bit little bit of an OCD magnet really, as a result of as soon as you have began rolling I do not actually see how one might stroll away until the web page is delightfully clean and every part’s a part of your ball.
To entry the sport sort ‘Katamari’ into Google search, and the outcomes web page will seem wanting because it often does. However within the prime proper there is a colourful ball which begins to wobble, begging for a click on, and once you do the sport begins: you information the ball round with the arrow keys, and scale it up with all Google’s choices and widgets.
“Katamari is a nostalgic sport for many people and has a big fan following,” Google engineer Lucas Bullen advised Kotaku. “The recognizable sport mechanic of things getting hooked up to the rolling Katamari is so enjoyable and distinctive that we needed to see it work together with the Search web page and provides followers a chance to play with the Katamari outdoors of simply the video games”.
Bullen says Google has different gaming Easter Eggs for gamers to search out, and suggests looking Star Fox and The Final of Us.
We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie is the current Steam launch of the second sport within the sequence, and my favorite (the primary sport, Katamari Damacy, was launched on PC in 2018). “Namco made a number of extra Katamari video games after this with out the involvement of sequence creator Keita Takahashi, however this was positively the height,” mentioned our personal Wes Fenlon, accurately. “It provides extra mission selection and different playable characters and has a humorous meta story about Katamari being so standard they needed to do it once more.”
These video games are a delight, and Google’s little tribute is a pleasant workplace diversion. Plus, you get to think about the Prince rolling throughout the US and finally schlooping-up the Googleplex on the ultimate stage, saving us all from the inevitable near-future the place AI-generated web sites destroy what little worth Google search nonetheless has left.