Punishing my tendency to never bother watching Nintendo Directs, Bandai Namco used today’s Switch 2-focused showcase to announce Once Upon a Katamari: the first mainline, non-remake Katamari game since 2011. It’ll be out on PC as well, come October 24th 2025, and while you’ll once again be rolling up entire societies around a swelling sticky ball, this one will span a range of time periods – so you’ll be able to knead whole new planets out of feudal Japan or ancient Greece.
As is tradition, dating back to 2004’s original Katamari Damacy, said rolling will be on behalf of godlike space-monarch and perennial fuckup The King of All Cosmos, whose latest oopsie has re-destroyed the Earth for what must be his fifth or sixth time now. Though it looks like the historical eras you’ll be rolling up are all Earth-based too, so you’re presumably building a replacement planet out of itself, which the King will then ruin in the future, and will need to built out of itself again, and so on, for infinity. Nice bit of timelooping existential horror for this child-friendly puzzle game, there.
Other touches of newness include the ability to customise your lil’ rolling person’s appearance, an original, likely catchy soundtrack, and most pertinently to your rolling endeavours, a powerup system that can make for faster or more precise detritus-bundling. In the trailer we see a range-extending magnet, rocket boosters, and the power to stop TIME ITSELF.
I admit to not having played any Katamari games on PC, much of my series experience coming in the form of bleary-eyed New Year’s Day sessions on consoles belonging to whichever old college friend had just let me sleep on their floor. But Windows has seen a few of the remakes in recent years, with Liam (RPS in Peace) loving 2023’s We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie in particular. More? Why not.
