Are you ready to be a father? Are you ready to take care of your family, mow the lawn, and be an octopus?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might be ready to play Octodad. At its core, Octodad is a game driven by physics that essentially throws you into various rooms to accomplish challenge goals in checklist fashion. What it does particularly well is hide that fact behind a funny premise and a story that might at first seem to be all for fun and good humor, but let’s not get too far ahead.
Octodad is an octopus driven entirely by physics. There’s absolutely nothing about his movement that is particularly scripted or predetermined; even the fact that he is able to stand upright is an illusion likely done by having him dangling from an invisible joint suspended above him. Controlling him is intentionally slippery and imprecise; the left and right legs are respectively raised by holding the left or right mouse buttons, and while a foot is raised it can be moved with the mouse. This means you’ll be putting one foot in front of the other repeatedly to get around. You can also switch to arms mode, which lets you manipulate your right arm in full 3D space, as well as smack it to objects in order to carry them around. It’s not simple, but most people should be able to get the hang of it after the first level has been entirely completed.
No worries kids, daddy got the groceries.
One good thing about Octodad’s controls is that unless you thrust him over a ledge, it’s almost impossible to make him actually fall over, though he’ll certainly wobble quite a bit depending on how fast you’re whipping your limbs around. This means that although he’s certainly unwieldy, for the most part controlling him isn’t frustrating.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch takes you through the abridged version of his life story, starting when you get married and continuing throughout key moments. It also plays some pretty hilarious intro credits with a great Octodad themed song straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. Many of the key moments are humdrum, such as grilling burgers and mowing the lawn, but these things are of course made humorous just because you’ll be so wobbly and clumsy while doing them. Early on in the game I was tasked with simply pouring my daughter a glass of milk and it turned into quite the undertaking. I opened the refrigerator and saw the milk, but accidentally grabbed something else. I threw it behind me to get rid of it and it knocked everything off the kitchen table. I grabbed the milk and headed to the living room, where Octodad’s daughter was smiling happily holding her empty glass out. While trying to shake the milk out into the glass, I cracked her brother in the side of the head with the jug. Moments like this happen as frequently as you are careless, and make for some good humor.
The point of the game though is that nobody realizes you’re an octopus, and actions that might lead to you smacking people around or breaking things affect a purple stealth meter which, for all intents and purposes, acts a bit more like a health meter. When it’s full, you’ve been “discovered” and the level you’re on will be forced to end; it’s a simple mechanic that is used consistently across the entire game. There are boss “fights” as well, typically escape sequences where your neighbor, the one character who knows you’re an octopus and has it out for you, often appears at the end of certain levels to try and kill you.
Collectible neckties may provide completionists with replay value.
The game is fully voiced, and it’s done pretty well. As much as I despise children and the idea of a sort of happy-go-lucky 50s-style family life that Octodad portrays, the game was written and voiced in such a way that I found myself becoming very quickly attached to Octodad’s children and wife. His daughter in particular is hilarious and sweet, and his wife, while a bit too normal, is hardly a Stepford wife. It wasn’t hard to grow to admire her simple charms. Without giving away too much, the gut punch from left field was finding out early on that Octodad and his wife haven’t been getting along too well; it’s so real considering the otherwise cartoonish tone of the game, and your wife seems so legitimately upset at times that at one point I thought I was going to cry. It’s not that their relationship is in any way disturbing, but rather that Octodad’s wife seems legitimately sad that something is wrong with him without knowing what it is, and Octodad finds it very difficult to understand her point of view since, you know, he’s an octopus.
The tone is uneven though as the game hurtles toward its conclusion. The legitimately touching moments often end with slapstick, like a 13 year old who accidentally said something emotional so he immediately kicks a puppy across the lawn to remind people that he’s totally not gay or nothin’. There’s nothing wrong with having both tones in the game, but they’re not balanced and the developers seem immediately ashamed every time they pull your heart strings.
Something else that changes as the game reaches its end are the tasks Octodad is meant to accomplish. The game is oddly at its best when it has you doing mundane chores in a clumsy manner, but about halfway through the 3 hour experience it wants you to buck up, get “serious”, and do some real platforming, sneaking, and boss fighting. This is where the game begins to fall apart, and what was once a hysterical giggle about how you whacked yourself in the head with the lawnmower turns into legitimate anger and bitterness trying to slink past people who end the level on sight, or trying to fight a boss using a control scheme that isn’t meant for “playing well”, yet they expect you to anyways. There is even a part where you’re asked to go up an escalator that is rapidly moving downwards, and it requires such precision and luck that it’s nearly impossible to do without changing the sensitivity settings.
Don’t you stare at me, cashier man. I BELONG at the aquarium.
As they ask the player to do increasingly intricate things with a control system that is designed to be sloppy, they don’t expand your arsenal of abilities to match. Some simple new moves like an ability to press a direction and perform some sort of dodge would have made the final boss slightly less frustrating, though what truly made that fight so frustrating is that dodging via flailing your legs more often than not causes your held item to become unstuck from your hand.
At the end of the day, it feels like the developers rode their original idea all the way to the finish line and were so overtaken with the positive initial praise that they didn’t feel like they had to add anything else to the formula. Although the game is Steam Workshop enabled, it would truly benefit from some sort of official upgrades and additions to make the experience richer and more pleasant. As is though, it’s hard to give Octodad: Dadliest Catch a glowing review, especially since at $15 it feels overpriced for what it boils down to. Perhaps time and Workshop additions will change that.
