Octodad: Dadliest Catch

I’ll be honest, I’m not even sure why I paid money for this one. I’m hoping it was on offer at the time because it didn’t feel like £5 worth of game. Anyway, the reason I started playing it was because I was flicking through my games trying to decide what to play while Skyrim installed (the remastered one – oh yeah!) and my step-son got excited about seeing Octodad in the inventory. I thought why not, but almost immediately regretted it.

The controls are mind boggling to the point where, having just finished the game, if I was to pick up the controller again in an hour, I probably wouldn’t be able to move Octodad across a room.

Anyway, the premise is pretty fucked up. You are an Octopus pretending to be human. You didn’t misread that, you are an Octopus. And in the game’s opening you have to get married to a human woman. No one knows you are an Octopus and you have to con the world into thinking you are a regular human. Shit gets more fucked up in chapter 2 when two human kids pop out of nowhere.

Aside from trying to have a family and being afraid of the aquarium, there is also a chef who knows you are an octopus and keeps trying to kill you. I imagine it’s so he can cook Octodad or something but this never really gets addressed.

Anyway on to the juicy stuff – the controls. I understand that this game is supposed to have a back-to-basics style premise. The controls for Octodad enable you to control his right and left ‘legs’ and one arm which can stick to things. Sounds easy right? It’s not. They’ve couldn’t have made the controls more fucktarded if they tried.

When you start out, you are gently introduced to moving around and it doesn’t take that long to get sort of used to it but even then, you only have half control over the character. This is made worse by the fact you are penalised for knocking stuff over. I did wonder what it would be like to try and play a level without knocking any stuff over. It would probably make the playthrough about 20 hours longer than it should be.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

Playing the game is one thing but trying to gather the miscellany of achievements is something else. Basically you have to do a wild variety of different things and not a lot of them are directly related to the story - which is something I do like about achievement lists - however some of shit you have to do with the added pressure of shit controls is not fun.

I’ll mention some of my personal favourites and personal struggles with them. The first one was the secret gardener which tasks you with weeding the garden without stepping on any of the flowers. The path through the flowers is really narrow and the flowers are really sensitive to octopus proximity which isn’t great when Octodad handles like a reversing articulated lorry on ice.

There are two achievements that sort of ruin each other; one for dying and one for playing the whole game without dying. In order to die and get the Trim Your Moustache achievement you have to throw an item on to a branch and then get sucked into a mower. This is hard as throwing anything in this game is beyond ridiculous. Completing the game without dying however is relatively easy. If you play the game on easy, no one will ever know you are an octopus even if you squirted ink in their face.

There were another two that fucked me off due to the bad controls. You have to complete some kind of weird dancing game (apt for an aquarium) without missing a step and running up two escalators against their direction of movement in less than 30 seconds. Both of these tasks require a certain amount of dexterity and coordination, something that you can have masses of but the game won’t afford you any chances to use your own abilities.

And that brings me nicely onto the last one I’ll mention - getting all the collectibles. Now, I enjoy going off the beaten track but having a set of 39 collectibles that require you to be able to climb narrow things, jump and sometimes develop the ability to fly with a character that’s diametrically opposed to walking in a straight line is an episode of blood-curdling frustration. But I got there in the end.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Potential Spoilers: Now despite what I’ve said, Octodad is fun for about an hour but after that, it makes you want to scream or give up. However, if you do manage to get to the end of the game, the kids I’ve mentioned earlier work out you are an Octopus and actually ask the obvious question; why do they exist if daddy isn’t human? Too right. And after playing through the whole bizarre universe, it’s almost nice to see the developers acknowledge that their creation is beyond weird.