Oh, the so-called American Way of Life. The perfect life: House with garden, barbecue and neighbor psycho, work with good salary, a wife who loves us with madness, children who behave as such and have us as a model, a dream wedding, a Playmouth Belvedere 58 in the Garage … In this game of the Young Horses rookies we have all that, right? At least everything the
USA canons of happy families dictate. Only … Let’s see, only with a slight nuance, a tiny exception, a little lie that we have hidden from our wife and the whole world : We are an octopus.Not a human Sobon whose arms are multiplied in the company of women,
but a real octopus, with its deposit of ink, adhesive tentacles and problems when posing as a biped lawyer, so what for someone is the most mundane of tasks such as making coffee or plucking weeds, for the poor of our protagonist his condition causes the everyday to jump out the window in Octodad: Dadliest Catch.
This is the premise of the study Young Horses , to which the success of their university project converted into Kickstarter has allowed them to reach both the PC world – with a premiere at the beginning of the year – and the consoles, debuting in the Next Gen with the PlayStation 4 version of his particular
Octodad, the most slapstick game we have seen in a long time, and original until saying enough. In itself, and under the aspect of a kind of adventure punctuated with instants of action and even infiltration – yes, Stealth to the Snake and everything, and implemented
with logic in the plot – the game is nothing more than a kind of simulation of the life of a father. Although that yes, gone through the sieve of a surreal comedy absolutely delirious in plan that were made in the USA cinema of the 80s-the title in
Spain would have been ” My father, what an octopus!”or similar. Delirious satire of the prototypical family portrait USA perfect and of the playability of everyday actions of titles like those of David Cage, our Octodad is living precisely that: The American Dream. But as in all good 80s tape, there is always a bad guy who wants to spoil the day to our nice and sympathetic protagonist.
With the left joystiq we will control the arm with respect to the axis of the depth – ideal to push doors, put things on -, and with the right we will raise it up or down or move it to the sides. R1 serves to catch things with the ‘arm’ suckers and release them by pressing it again. The best thing is when walking, which is done alternating L2 + R2 as if it were the left leg and the right leg and gives rise to a discarding animation that the Jim Carrey of the times of The Mask or Ace Ventura would sign.
The touch panel also gives us control of the arm and in its entirety, so to interact with objects and actions related to these becomes as comfortable. Octodad is one of those disconcerting games at the beginning, simply because for 3 generations we have been educated in consoles so that we manage a character using the left stick, but using it here we will only partially move his arm.
We have to make ourselves aware that the triggers are used to walk, something that from the tutorial becomes easy and in a second we will pass through corridors at full speed, although it is inevitable to press the stick by intuition when we want to move and doubt for a second why we do not do it.
The truth is that Octodad is one of those titles that can not be taken seriously, and therefore not qualify like the rest. Yes, the control of the character is absolutely infernal. But it has its justification in that we are an octopus. AN OCTOPUS. Try to imagine that you do not have any bone structure and you must open the bathroom door, place the coffee maker or buy a pizza.
As we say, it’s like looking at a David Cage-style Farenheit title and completely flipping it over, injecting tons of the most absolute surrealism into a real response from Tim Schafer and Double Fine in one of his usual, crazy sessions of Brainstorming. A title of those that are not seen often lately, and that is made with the simplest idea of constant discarding fun.
In other words: It is a game created to smile by driving a cephalopod that walks-or tries-in a bipedal way and tries to be a father, a beloved husband and a clerk.
How milks are you going to ask such madness to have a minimum of normal gameplay? In its madness and impossible, frustrating and bitter control is where precisely lies its enormous charm. Because for something as simple as dressing up for a wedding and putting on a bow tie, we messed up with God destroying buffets, breaking windows and causing chaos simply by moving forward.
