Growing up and accepting your differences is a huge part of everyone’s life, but what if you were stuck in a ‘T’ shape and couldn’t bend your arms like everyone else? To a T is a puzzle adventure game that explores the part of a teenager who has just turned 13, as they learn to accept themselves and their disability and find out the mystery of why they are the shape of a T.
To a T takes place in an episodic fashion, where the player has to complete tasks to advance the story. The episodes start with you finding a balloon with the episode’s number, triggering an opening theme that takes into account the player’s chosen look and what they’re wearing, and has an ending theme when complete, just like a Saturday morning cartoon. The story itself starts off fairly simple and gets weirder through each episode, of which there are eight in total. The game shouldn’t take long to get through – about five hours or so – but completing everything and getting all achievements is a bit trickier.
Each episode opens by providing a place to get to on the map, but what the young teen gets up to in between is up to the player. There is a choice at the beginning of almost every episode to play mini-games washing your face, eating your breakfast, and brushing your teeth, all with the help of the pet dog. Sometimes the town can also be explored before touching the balloon, and it’s probably recommended in order to achieve 100%, as some episodes railroad the teen through the story with nothing but dialogue boxes.
At first, you’re restricted to just going to school, but eventually the whole town opens up. Around the town, there are coins that can be picked up and spent in shops for more clothes, hair cuts, and food-based mini-games in stalls owned by talking giraffes where special prizes can be won if the high score is achieved. Other mini-games are to do with maths, science and PE, which aren’t necessary to get perfect to complete To a T fully.
As episodes are completed, more abilities are unlocked that let the main character traverse the town easier and get to high places. This is the bulk of the gameplay, as a lot of the exploration can be skipped to simply move through the story. There may be a bit of frustration sometimes as the character can’t necessarily go where you want them to, or the game unintentionally gets them stuck in place because they have gone slightly out of bounds. The camera generally moves on its own, but in some situations, there is the choice to move it around.
There are also problems with the mini-games; for example, in the giraffe ice-cream collecting mini-game, specifically with a controller, the cones seem to sometimes not go the way you point them, but then other times they’re perfect. In other points of the game, the teen could be standing in front of what they need to interact with, and for some reason, has no means of doing so. Patches have been fairly frequent since release, so hopefully this will be fixed.
In terms of storytelling, the dialogue and morals can seem a bit too simple and heavy handed. The results can easily be worked out before they happen and any conflict is resolved rather easily. The world is bizarre, involving multiple people of different colours and hairstyles, and even anthropomorphic animals who seem to be from another place that speak their own language. The story from the perspective of not only the teen, but also other members of their family will be witnessed throughout To a T.
The soundtrack is pleasant if a bit odd. The opening and closing themes for the episodes are quite whacky and bizarre, but very catchy. The background music is something that will be remembered if really thinking about it, but in general it just blends in with the rest of the game.
To a T looks fairly simplistic, but has a nice cartoony style to it. It is quite heavy on the Steam Deck in medium settings, often dropping below 30 fps on the handheld, but in general, this doesn’t seem to affect gameplay too much. If you have a fairly modern PC and graphics card, it should perform quite well. There is a choice of settings, including filters to make the game look like it’s on a CRT TV, including a rounded screen, making it look pixelated, and a mode called ‘Fun’ that gives everything multi-coloured flashing lights, amongst others.
