A much more successful game would have done away with any and all explanations and presented Octodad as an absolute. The second half of Dadliest Catch is dedicated to the chef and Octodad’s struggle, culminating in a boss fight best forgotten. The chef is the only person who is able to see through Octodad’s - admittedly flimsy - disguise and is obsessed with exposing the cephalopod charlatan. There’s an obligatory flashback sequence explaining the origins of Octodad and of his rivalry with a chef. In either case the latter half of the game largely removes what made it so fun to begin with. Perhaps the developers thought it needed a little something more to sell it to the masses, or perhaps they felt there needed to be a through line for the protagonist. The entire concept of Dadliest Catch is so bonkers that it can stand on its own without the need to resort to such tired and worn out conventions. One particuarly egregious sequence about two thirds of the way through requiring the player to press one button repeatedly for at least 5 minutes comes to mind. There is absolutely no need for stealth or boss fights. Walking successfully down the aisle, pouring your daughter - don’t ask - a glass of milk, grilling burgers, shopping for cereal and waiting in line to purchase a ticket to the aquarium are oddly, the bits of Dadliest Catch that are far and away the most fun. It’s as the game wears on and introduces more traditional videogame type challenges - stealth sections and boss fights - in favour of the absurdist everyday activities featured in the opening levels that Dadliest Catch loses its footing. It’s not until the game wears on and the encountered NPCs graduate from neighbour to marine biologist - with their increased sense of what’s “fishy” - that your likelihood of being discovered is ever a real threat. It’s quite difficult in the early levels to fail (but not to flail). Controlling Octodad is never not a struggle mind you, it simply graduates from impossible to controlled chaos.Īfter changing into his shiny, new wedding suit Octodad must walk down the aisle without arousing the suspicions of the human lookers on. After struggling for the first few minutes the controls quickly reveal themselves as the strangely intuitive beast that they are.
Got that? R1 grabs onto object while L2 and R2 are used to move his “legs” respectively. The left stick controls Octodad’s right arm’s forward and backwards movement while the right stick controls up and down. Dadliest Catch wants you to struggle to control its main character because it draws its comedy and enjoyment not from success, but from each and every flailing failure and then eventual success. At first the controls are alien and impenetrable, but that feels like the point. In a hilarious opening sequence players are introduced to the controls and the basic premise. Apparently nobody - except the angry chef, who we’ll get to - has noticed that Octodad is in fact an octopus masquerading as a man. You’ll not be left wanting those two hours of your life back, but you will be wondering how you so quickly went from laughing to sighing to finally rolling your eyes in boredom and frustration.ĭadliest Catch begins in the most surreal way with the titular character preparing for his wedding, to a human female. It’s a grace then that it only lasts around two hours. What begins as an absurd, colourful cartoon romp eventually devolves into the most tedious of tired videogame conventions. The amount of fun to be had with Octodad: Dadliest Catch is inverse to the amount of time spent playing it.
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