Once Upon a Katamari has reignited my love for a series that hasn't released a mainline game in 14 years, and now it's the only game I want to play

Katamari is a perfect example of a series I go through phases of being obsessed with playing, sort of like the Minecraft itch most people get for a few months a year. With that said, the last time I found myself utterly consumed by the story of the Prince and the King of the Cosmos was within Katamari Damacy: Reroll in 2019, so it's safe to say a revisit into this obsession has been long overdue. Luckily, Once Upon a Katamari has come along to remind me of the moreish chaos of these games, and quickly reminded me why I have spent so many hours essentially rolling a virtual ball around.

Once Upon a Katamari is the newest mainline addition to the Katamari franchise in 14 years. It's as bright and chaotic as ever, but with a number of new additions to make each of its levels even more engaging. After warming back up to the controls and remembering just how annoyed I get every time I crash into an object I'm not ready to pick up yet, I was fully sucked back into its world.

You're still on a mission to send stars back into the sky after the King of the Cosmos has unsurprisingly destroyed them all (again), much like older games, but this time you're sent travelling through time in a little spaceship called the S.S. Prince to do so. This means going back through history to a variety of different eras to complete quests for man and creature alike, sending bundles of items you've picked up back into the stratosphere to make incredibly odd looking planets.

Unlocking these new eras is easily the most thrilling part of Once Upon a Katamari, mostly because you simply don't know where you'll end up. One minute you're rolling tumbleweeds in the American Frontier, and the next you're being tasked with collecting as many creatures as you possibly can from the seabed in the Jurassic Era, or trekking through the Ice Age, or Edo Japan. Half of the fun is trying to guess where exactly you'll be sent next with nothing to go off but the level's main challenge, which more often than not just tells you what specific item you're being told to collect.

However in an attempt to clear up any confusion, each stage is introduced with a cutscene that vaguely shows you where you've landed. As much as I wanted to rely on this to plan a route, making the most of the time limit by preemptively locating whichever items I'd been tasked with gathering, everything changes once you're shrunk down to the size of the Prince and have to actually start the level. No matter how many times I've played Katamari, I always manage to massively underestimate just how small you are when you begin a round, so all of the larger items you've just spent time planning your path towards will need to be left until you've increased the size of your Katamari.

But things move so incredibly quickly, and there's a constant feeling of frenzied chaos in each round. It never feels like you're under pressure, regardless of how many comments the King of the Cosmos makes about how useless you are, but instead adds to the fun. When you bump into items you're not quite ready to roll up, it can be frustrating but you're still given plenty of opportunities to rectify this and there are plenty of secret corridors or rooms where items are hidden away to help you meet the quota you've been given.

It's easy to be intimidated by the initial figure in rounds where you're tasked with gathering a specific item, like "gather 360 beverages" for example, but before you know it you'll be exceeding that number and tasked with finding even more. Even though this feels like there's no way to really "complete" a level since there's always more to get and not really any limit to what you can roll, this just gave me a push to keep playing levels over and over again to see if I could beat my own personal best.

The Jurassic Era, which quickly became my favourite set of levels, is a perfect example of how there's no limit to what you can roll up either. Although massive dinosaurs stand around as obstacles at the start, if you manage to get to a reasonable size you can easily gather them up in your ball too. Literally nothing is safe from the power of the Prince, and that's where so much of the fun, and the charm of the game comes from.

I lost count of the amount of times I found myself struggling to gather enough items to essentially unlock the ability to roll up something much larger, before making a mental note to come back later. It doesn't take long for you to clear huge patches of the map of any items lying around, even though you started as something tiny. I got a lot of satisfaction from trying to roll as much as I could in the first few minutes of a round, before aiming exclusively for the ridiculously large items just to see if I could pick them up, and subsequently cackling at the fact an entire family and their children have now ended up being rolled around.

New tools also make each run easier, like the magnet which brings any nearby object of the right size to your Katamari, and a rocket which makes you move a lot faster for a period of time. These new additions will definitely help new players with some of the more challenging, more expectant levels. But, they are also just fun to mess around with. It's nice to have a helping hand at the end of the level if you haven't quite got enough to scrape by and move onto the next level, or if you're seconds away from getting the last item you need.

It's an incredibly easy game to pick up and then most likely struggle to put down. I'm usually quite good at sticking to the "one more run" rule once I say it out loud, but Once Upon a Katamari has shown me otherwise. It's hard to feel any sense of boredom when you're bombarded with colours and sounds in a round and given such a small timeframe to work with. If anything, it's just shown me how competitive I can be, even if that's against myself.