To a T review: "Like standing in a warm spill of sunbeams and eating your favorite home-cooked meal all at once"

To a T is much more than its premise suggests. Yes, you play as a T-posing child who must navigate their life with both arms perpetually raised at either side. Yes, that makes walking through doors a nightmare. But that's not what the debut game from Uvula – a small studio co-founded by Katamari Damacy's Keita Takahashi – revolves around.

Instead, To a T is about asking serious questions in a silly voice. What does it mean to be perfect? What does perfect even mean? These are questions raised in the game's first minutes (through a song-and-dance routine that also includes barking humans, no less) and explored over the course of five hours. After those hours are up, you may have some answers to those questions. You may instead leave only with mastery over diagonal sandwich speed-eating, or a lingering impression that trains are very cool. They are.

Take a walk on the wide side

To a T follows a 13-year-old – their default name Teen – as they navigate small-town life in the '90s. Teen's condition means there are light puzzle elements for even the most routine tasks. While eating cereal, you control each arm and each hand individually, pouring both milk and King Pig cereal before navigating spoon to mouth. Tilting to fit through doors quickly becomes second-nature.

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Later, you're asked to handle slightly more complex tasks – like outrunning a train on a busy station platform – but To a T never really tries (or wants to be) challenging in that sense. Sure, school is hard when science lessons demand mixing an exact formula and P.E. risks clattering into goalposts, but Teen is largely used to living with outstretched hands. The condition's novelty is intentionally buffed out quite quickly, and your expectations of the game – perhaps one where you're strung from one ludicrous situation to the next, forced to make do with uncooperative arms – soon fall apart, leaving you to lurch in the unknown.

To a T is less focused on giving you something to do with your arms, and more intent on telling a story. Teen is different, and coming to terms with that is part of the tale. But even then, it's a T-shaped piece of a much larger puzzle. There's something weird going on in town, and the game isn't afraid to step outside of Teen's perspective to explore that. One episode follows Teen's dog investigating a gut feeling that something isn't right, his interview subjects ranging from a ladybug journalist to a weight-lifting penguin. I'm loath to say even that much (this is one of those games where it's in your best interest to read as little about it as possible), but To a T only truly takes off when it moves past the initial premise and into the absurd.

Given the whole thing can be completed in a tight four hours – five if you take your time exploring, longer with a post-credits free-roam – it takes too long to find its groove, and the opening hour is deceptively simplistic and straightforward. To a T never quite gets a handle on whether it wants to show or tell, and later episodes are spectacularly surreal yet lean heavily on cutscenes.

Stand by T

By that point, developer Uvula will have already worked its magic on you. Playing To a T is like standing in a warm spill of sunbeams and eating your favorite home-cooked meal all at once. Richer and more life-affirming than anything I've played in years, it's hard to describe the potency of joy that makes this so worth playing – though one scene, with a group of children struggling to explain how a beautiful sunset is making them feel, captures even that.

Much of the credit goes to To a T's seaside town setting, which is home to a mix of (mostly) regular humans and talking animals. A giraffe called Giraffe runs a food stand, while the local hairdresser is managed by one particularly inspired crab. Some birds can speak, while others are… just pigeons. It's closest in tone to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which friendship comes easy and you can play for an hour and leave on first-name terms with everyone you've met. The only tripping point is the camera, which is often locked to one angle. This is great when you're being fed picturesque mushroom forests, but less so while trying to cross a road with limited depth perception. It's extra-finicky during platforming sections, which, while infrequent, are incredibly clunky due to the constant wrangling it takes to keep your camera in check.

Yet even the camera is subject to Uvula's wonderfully weird, often meta, humor. During a shot of Teen's house, their mother speaks in jumbled symbols until she opens a window for you to hear. One turtle complains because a dog is blocking him from view in the cutscene. Elsewhere, some animations last just long enough for you to realize they're being deliberately stretched out – like the seemingly-endless spew of vomit from downing a gross drink.

To a T is weird to its bones, and it's clear Uvula takes great pride in that. The whole thing is nebulous by design, and isn't so much a grand gesture of positivity as it is an ode to the little quirks you love almost without realizing. I love, for instance, the way Teen's umbrella is slightly wider than his mother's to account for being held at arm's reach. I love rain in gaming, and To a T has the very best. That might not sound like the sort of profundity a recommendation could hinge upon, but if you like rain for the same reason I do – the warmth and contentment it brings when you're on the inside looking out – then perhaps you'll get it.

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