After Katamari Damacy and Wattam, Keita Takahashi is hard at work on his next game: it's called Uvula. It is, most likely, about uvulas.
During today's Annapurna Interactive Showcase we got a brief teaser for Takahashi's next game. It showed a boy in Takahashi's signature art style gently snoring away, with the camera zoomed in close on his uvula – you know, the little hangy down thing in the back of the throat. It slowly zoomed out to his face, and a dog licks the boy's cheek. That's all!
It's anyone's guess how this is going to make a game, but if anyone can do it, it's probably Takahashi. All of his past games have been extremely quirky and original, from Katamari (a game about rolling every object on earth into a giant katamari ball to send into space and turn into a star) to Wattam, a game that inexplicably involved a lot of poop.
Notably, Wattam was developed by Funomena, which appears to have shut down as of earlier this year following a report from People Make Games alleging that studio head Robin Hunicke had emotionally abused the staff. A later report from Fanbyte stated that Takahashi and Hunicke had clashed over the design of Wattam and eventually physically barricaded themselves off from one another.
Annapurna Interactive published Wattam, as well as games by both Mountains and Fullbright, which have also had allegations levvied against them in the last few years. Annapurna has not commented on the situation at Funomena, but notably Takahashi appears to have attached his named to Uvula independent of a studio entity.
You can get a full rundown of everything announced at today's Annapurna Interactive showcase in our roundup.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.