Everything from grocery store food products to aquarium exhibits are laden with sly jokes and references, even if I could see some being a little esoteric for those who aren't super immersed in recent videogame culture. More than anything else, these early sequences keep Octodad grounded.Īnd these places are absolute delights to explore. Various family portraits, hyper-detailed, item-ridden environments, a plethora of cute dialogue exchanges - it all adds a certain believability to this world of relentless insanity. Small things are key in these sorts of scenes, and Octodad nails them. From an adorable marriage to typical morning replete with coffee-making and lawn-mowing to deceptively hazardous grocery shopping, I got a brilliantly mundane look at the terrifying struggle that is Octodad's day-to-day life. It doesn't always balance the two sides of its tone perfectly, but in its best moments it reminded me of a decent-ish Pixar movie. By and large it's a game that tickles funny bones for solid (if not quite incredible) chuckles, but it knows when to start tugging heartstrings as well.
And in conveying that, Octodad is both witty and touching, punctuating barrages of absurdism with some surprisingly emotional blubs and glubs. He's a cipher for that insecure whisper (or mumble or scream) inside all of us that says we can't be everything those we love want us to be. This stems in part from the plight of Octodad's character. I had my fair share of rib-rattling belly laughs, but they often came alongside some small amount of bitterness, and occasionally even a hint of melancholy. It's unwieldy, inefficient, and frequently a source of hilarious rage, but that's the whole point. Regardless, he moves like a windmill falling down a mountain (and also both are made of jelly).
You switch between two basic modes at the press of a button, one of which lets you drag/fling Octodad's "legs" forward while the other allows for tactile-ish manipulation of Octodad's touchiest, feeliest tentacles. Octodad's control scheme is entirely physics-based. Manage cookie settingsīut let's back up a bit, slip on a banana peel, and - rather frustratingly - land right back at the beginning. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. It's a complicated question in a tongue-in-cheek/cephalopodic beak thing game like this. But does it land? Again and again and again for the duration of a whole game? Er, yes and no.
He fears that his Average Human Family will realize what he really is despite the overwhelming subtlety of his disguise and. He's a determined hero, but also a timid one. Not even the opening credits to his own game! He just keeps on tripping, slipping, and, um, breakdancing until all obstacles are naught but gum on his foot cups. Not boxes, not scientists, not aquarium exhibits, not colossal sea-themed jungle gyms, not mad scientists, and definitely not banana peels. He's silly yet stern when it's called for, and he doesn't let anything get in the way of him and the needs of his family. Lord knows he's better at the whole parenting thing than my non-Octo-dad. But is his flailing, frequently failing return worth the wait? Can what basically amounts to a single joke sustain an entire game for hours? Or does this version of Octodad slip on a banana peel, ruin its immaculate suit, and disappoint not only its own adorable children, but also all the adorable children in the world? Here's wot I think. So here we are in 2014, and the second coming of the heart-stealing, identity-thieving octo-man/myth/legend is upon us. We first spent a whopping zero (s)quid on the original freeware version back in 2010, And Octodad 2, as it was known back in ye olde pre-Double-Fine-Adventure days, took Kickstarter by (relative) storm in 2011. Octodad: Dadliest Catch has been a long time in coming.
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