Next time you think you’re having a bad day be thankful you’re not Octodad. For those who don’t know, Octodad is an Octopus who for some reason has aspirations of living a stereotypical suburban life with his ‘family’. So he wears a disguise and squashes and squeezes his tentacles to mimic human form.
The main problems Octodad faces are performing routine everyday tasks that humans find easy. You will basically spend most of your time mowing the lawn or going shopping. But it’s in the mundane that Deadliest Catch’s ludicrous concepts thrive as you futilely attempt to keep Octodad’s tentacles in check.
The controls are simple, but as ineffective as they need to be to maintain hilarity. Holding ‘R2’ will raise the tentacle Octodad uses as his right leg and as you hold it you can move it around using the thumbsticks. Releasing the trigger will plop the tentacle down and sucker it to whatever surface it lands on. ‘L2’ does the same thing but with the tentacle used as his left leg. When you don’t hold a trigger the thumbsticks will be used to move your ‘arms’ and pressing ‘R1’ will pick something up using your suckers.
You always know what it is you need to do and what it is Octodad’s various limbs must do but getting them to do it isn’t all that easy. The controls are easy to grasp but intentionally impossible to master. Early on you will be tasked with taking a glass of milk to your daughter. Everything seems to go well but then opening the fridge to get the milk out results in catastrophe. Trays collapse and a ham slides across the floor along with the other contents of the fridge. Walking across the room doesn’t help much either with your various uncontrollable ‘limbs’ generally cause as much chaos as possible.
Fortunately there are very few ways in which you can fail. People are generally OK with you throwing yourself all over the place and leaving the place in complete disarray. There’s a bar at the bottom of the screen that acts as an octo-detection meter that will fail you if it fills. If people see you doing octopus related activities they will eventually get suspicious and see through your rather genius disguise.
People seem generally willing to look the other way. You’re bright yellow and talk only in different ‘blurb’ sounds. Everyone including your wife, kids and members of the public are willing to accept that you wear clothes and not ask any questions. Only one of your kids and a rather determined Japanese chef have their suspicions.
Obviously with the chef being Japanese he wants to cut Octodad up, cook him and eat him. And so you have your antagonist. At the end of each level the chef will show up and try to murder you and it’s up to you to escape whilst maintaining your ridiculous second life. These chef encounters are really the only challenge there is in Deadliest Catch and even then they’re not all that challenging, and they’re a bit short. Deadliest Catch doesn’t rely on the challenge of doing things smoothly but rather relishes in the fact that you won’t.
Sadly in only a couple of hours you will have the game completed. Luckily there is enough humour to keep things funny until the end of the game. For instance, Octodad can only communicate using intonation and tone so the subtitles that appear at the top of the screen are reminiscent of the much loved Elcor from Mass Effect. The comments of people that surround him are a treat too – I particularly enjoyed the cute ‘blurb’ sound Octodad makes to say hello to passers by.
But the gameplay suffers more than the humour as far as longevity goes. Although the tasks are reasonably varied the gameplay isn’t. Once you’ve grasped the main concepts of Deadliest Catch not a lot is going to change in the 3 hour campaign. By the end I certainly felt the need for a change in gameplay. It’s good fun, and extremely funny, but Deadliest Catch just feels more like a concept than a full game.
Dadliest Catch is incredible fun to play. It’s humorous and light hearted right to the end. Countless times I laughed to myself as I made a mistake performing a task and hurled various objects across the room. Or even just when I thought about how ridiculous the whole thing is. An Octopus walking on land, wearing a suit serves as just about the worst disguise ever in the history of time but even his wife accepts it and quizzes him on relatively trivial problems. And where did the kids come from?
Unfortunately the gameplay becomes a little boring before the end, despite the fact it only takes two or three hours to finish. A little more variation in the gameplay would’ve gone a long way rather than just relying entirely on the humour, despite how funny it is. But it is what it is; one of the funniest games I’ve ever been on. Octodad: Deadliest Catch provides a good couple of hours of fun that keep you laughing right until the end.
