We already got to play as a dolphin in Ecco the Dolphin and a shark in Jaws: Unleashed. Well, now we can add an octopus – Octodad: Dadliest Catch is what happens when a totally insane idea meets the quirkiest controls since Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness – the difference being, of course, that in this case, the result is a whole lot of fun.
Everyday life … just with tentacles
The story begins right where many other games would be rolling the credits over a happy ending – Octodad is in church about to get married. The catch, though, is that Octodad is a male octopus and his bride is a human woman. But it appears no one has the slightest clue that there’s anything out of the ordinary about this situation. Octodad doesn’t walk, so much as … whatever a cephalopod does to move about, as he attempts to dress himself appropriately for the occasion and most importantly, not attract any attention to his octopus-ness. The rest of the game consists of our tentacle protagonist trying to perform various mundane day-to-day tasks as he tries to pass himself off as your average family man providing for his wife and kids. Everything really could be so nice, but it seems that someone sees through the whole charade…
The whole game is designed to have you laughing and smiling for the whole 3 to 4 hours of gameplay. Fans of the animated series Futurama will no doubt notice similarities between Octodad and Dr. Zoidberg. At no time does the game really take itself seriously, and that’s a good thing. After all, it’s a story about an octopus desperately trying to pass himself off as human in various everyday situations. Whether it’s at the grocery store, the breakfast table, or a trip to the aquarium, the result is non-stop chaos and ridiculous humor. Playing through the ten levels, you sometimes get the impression you’re watching some kind of wacky cartoon.
Tentacle-eye coordination
To give us something special in terms gameplay, the developers have deliberately made the controls imprecise and confusing in order to simulate the feeling of trying to move around like a normal person when you’ve got eight tentacles instead of two arms and two legs. Instead of simply using the analog stick to move about, each tentacle is controlled individually, using both analog sticks as well as the L and R buttons. To make matters worse, the fixed camera perspective follows Octodad and you can’t move it around, though you hardly ever actually lose sight of what’s going on. Your objectives are relatively simple – at least in theory. But in practice, the unconventional control scheme makes completing them a real challenge.
Most tasks require precise tentacle-eye coordination, whether you’re climbing a ladder, avoiding banana peels on the ground, or moving sideways through the freezer aisle at the supermarket to get some frozen pizza for your kids. Other mundane tasks include making coffee, mowing the lawn, wedding the garden, and playing basketball. The object of the game is to have Octodad complete all these tasks as skillfully as possible, while arousing as little suspicion as possible to the fact that he’s an octopus. Otherwise, your suspicion meter will fill up, and your cover is blown. However, automatic save points are regular enough to ensure that this never gets too frustrating. Reading all this, it might sound kind of boring, but it really ends up being a lot of fun in the context of the game, and there’s something to laugh about around every corner.
Limited replay value
Though you can move about relatively freely in each area of the game, there’s not much else to do besides completing your main objectives. The only reason to play through the game again is to collect all the neckties strewn throughout the game. In “Free Play” mode, you can replay individual levels, which can be a lot of fun in the multiplayer split-screen co-op mode. But instead of playing as different characters, each player controls a part of Octodad, which of course results in the kind of slapstick chaos the programmers intended.
Utilitarian graphics, crazy physics
The colorful, cartoony graphics in this game of skill appear rather crude and aren’t all that detailed. Environments, objects, and figures are very well-defined, but in general they come off looking like they belong not even to the current generation of consoles, but to the previous one. On top of that, the load times could have been a bit shorter, and there are also times when the can graphics get choppy, especially towards the end of the game. Graphics tricks like water and fire effects, as well as any interesting interplay between light and shadow, are few and far between. One particularly annoying thing is how clipping errors can sometimes cause tentacles to slip through objects, and it takes forever to get them back out.
While the graphics are rather utilitarian, the developers have put all their efforts into the game’s physics, and they’ve done a great job. The soundtrack is pretty decent, too. Octodad himself just babbles unintelligibly, and the voiceovers for the other characters are fitting. The music, not very lively overall, remains discreetly in the background. But the diverse sound effects triggered by Octodad’s on-screen antics are pretty impressive.
Official Trailer
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