You may have missed a terrific, new Katamari Damacy

Plus: GeoGuessr players' Saudi pushback, Embracer's next split, a Mega Man sale bump and more.

The most satisfying 10 seconds of any video game I played this year just might have been those I spent rolling up the keys to a keyboard in a little-discussed recent sequel to the great Katamari Damacy. (If you don’t know: That’s the great, oddball series of games about using a ball to roll up stuff.)

You can see me roll up those keys at the start of the clip above.

The game I’m playing, Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE, was released in early April and was the first new, original Katamari game in 14 years (I’m not counting two discontinued mobile spin-offs… one was a side-scroller, another a clicker game).

You may not have heard much about KDRL, because it was released exclusively to Apple Arcade, where it’s received a decent but not amazing 359 user ratings and a 4.3 out of 5 user score.

Some players are just happy to play a Katamari game again.

The core formula, originally conceived by designer Keita Takahashi, is still one of gaming’s best: You roll a ball through rooms, streets, or parks filled with knick-knacks, animals, and people. You roll up the smallest things, which makes the ball bigger so you can roll bigger things, as the level zooms out to show you more things that you can roll up. (Takahashi isn’t involved in this game. He moved on long ago, and has a very different but still very silly game, To a T, coming out next week.)

The new Katamari is that formula all over again. Nothing at all revolutionary. You’re rolling up items in a poolside apartment. You’re rolling up merchandise in a store. You’re rolling up people in a park, and eventually, buildings across multiple continents.

There’s an easily ignorable new story about the King of All Cosmos wanting to attract viewers to livestreams of the rolling that you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with it. It helps establish level goals such as time limits and things to collect (A level in which you need to roll up ducks, for example, will be sensationally titled “Things You NEED to Know about Ducks!” One about rolling up fish is called: “Biggest Fish EVER Caught!”)

Very little that’s in the new Katamari feels new, if you’ve played the games before. You could even consider KDRL a spiritual remake of the classic early 2000s, original Katamari games.

But!

I recently played the actual remakes of those early Katamari games and even on PS5, they don’t look as good—and, crucially, don’t have levels as stuffed with stuff as this new game on Apple Arcade. That makes this new one, released not for consoles but for phones and tablets, feel like the most technologically advanced game in the franchise. The originals are still the most charming, but these feel, I guess you could say, “next-gen.”

Look at me rolling my way through a store. So much to roll up!

The big problem, and the reason I hesitate to just keep gushing is that the game’s default touch controls are dreadful. They are no doubt well-intentioned, but, no, Katamari Damacy’s famously finicky controls didn’t need to be made even more frustrating by mapping them to the taps and slides of my fingers on an iPhone or iPad screen.

Thankfully, you can hook up a controller.

I played KDRL as if it was a console game. I propped up my iPad, wirelessly connected a PS5 controller and then got rolling. Levels that were impossible before became fun challenges.

With a controller, I could enjoy the most luxuriously detailed Katamari game that I think anyone has ever made (By the way, if you’re wondering who actually developed this one, I’m not sure. It’s credited to publisher Bandai Namco, has a Criware logo, though they’re usually a tech/middleware company, and the actual “credits” page in the game simply lists the creators of the game’s music and, uh, fonts).

Apple Arcade games often remain exclusive to that iOS subscription platform for about a year, then they pop on PC and consoles. So there’s a decent chance Katamari Damacy Rolling LIVE will be out for other platforms in 2026.

Here’s one more clip. The obligatory late-level world roll-up!

---

---

Item 2: In brief…

🎮 The Federal Trade Commission has dropped its internal, administrative case against the Microsoft-Activision merger, following its recent loss in a U.S. federal court of appeals over its effort to block the deal.

• The FTC had sued in late 2022 to stop the gaming mega-merger, saying it “would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.” The commission’s vote at the time was 3-1, with three Democratic commissioners in the affirmative against one Republican.

• The dismissal on Thursday, passed with a 3-0 vote by the FTC’s Republican commissioners, citing the failed appeal. They stated: “The Commission has determined that the public interest is best served by dismissing the administrative litigation in this case.” (There were no other votes, because the FTC caps commissioners at three per political party, and the two Democrats who’d been in the agency were nominally fired in March, a move they’ve said was illegal.)

👀 The Embracer Group’s previously announced spin-off of its mid-size game studios will result in a new publicly traded company later this year called Coffee Stain Group, composed of 250 developers and publishers including the teams behind Goat Simulator, Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic, all based in Scandinavia. (The plan was tweaked and no longer involves Embracer’s THQ Nordic publishing group.)

• The remaining entity, which will contain big-budget studios Crystal Dynamics and Eidos as well as the rights-holders for Lord of the Rings and Dark Horse Comics, will be called Fellowship Entertainment.

• Embracer, once known for gobbling up dozens of companies and more recently for divestures, spin-offs and reorgs, seems to be revving that all back up. In a call with investors on Thursday, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors said: “We are working, very actively, on M&A, both looking at potential acquisitions, for example, within the upcoming spin-off, as well as looking into opportunities within mobile. We’re also looking at potential divestments of assets and companies that potentially could fit within better other structures within the industry.” He said other spin-offs from the big group were possible, too.

• Here are two slides from Embracer break down what’s in/out of the two publicly traded companies Embracer plans to split into later this year:

🗺️ The makers of GeoGuessr, the popular game in which people race to see how quickly they can identify where in the world a photo was taken, have quickly cancelled plans for the game to be featured in the upcoming Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Aftermath reports.

• Players had been upset about any affiliation with a tournament backed by the Saudi government, and had blacked out major user-made game maps in protest, leading the game’s creators to apologize and reverse course.

• Numerous major competitive video games, including Capcom’s Street Fighter, Riot’s Valorant, Epic’s Rocket League, Microsoft/Activision’s Call of Duty, and Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 are officially part of the event. The esports cup has nevertheless faced criticism that it is part of the kingdom’s “sportswashing” effort to distract from its human rights record.

🎮 Capcom’s updated franchise sales figures offer a surprise tidbit: Mega Man lifetime series sales ticked up from 42 million to 43 million between December 31 of last year and March 31, 2025.

• That’s despite no new releases in the long-running series of action games starring the blue-helmeted hero. But maybe he got more shine due to recently being featured in Amazon’s animated series Secret Level?

• Capcom’s more active mega-franchises got expected boosts from the prior quarter, with the Monster Hunter series rising to 120 million (from 108 million) and Resident Evil to 170 million (from 167 million). Remember: A new Monster Hunter was released in February.

🎬 A live-action Elden Ring movie is in the works with Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Civil War) attached as the writer/director, Bandai Namco has announced.

---

Item 3: The week ahead

Tuesday, May 27

• The Division 2: Battle for Brooklyn expansion (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) is released.

Wednesday, May 28

• To a T (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) is released.

Thursday, May 29

• The Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, an event highlighting new puzzle games and offering demos of unreleased titles, kicks off, running for a week via Steam.

Friday, May 30

• Elden Ring Nightreign (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) and F1 25 (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) are released.