From the Archives: Octodad: Dadliest Catch

From the Archives: Octodad: Dadliest Catch

Eight arms to hold you.

Limited Run Games landed a big one with its sixth release: Indie darling Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Originally released in 2014, Dadliest Catch was the critically lauded follow-up to an inventive adventure called, simply, Octodad.

The original Octodad was one a definitive early indie game. Released as a free title for personal computers, developed as a student project, cheerfully defying conventional thought about how video games need to be “easy to control” and “cooperative with the player’s intentions,” Octodad was at once whimsical, creative, frustrating, and utterly addicting.

This sequel followed in the original game’s footsteps—well, maybe “footsteps” is the wrong term to use here. After all, Octodad (the character) doesn’t have feet, only a set of eight muscular hydrostats, a few of which masquerade as human appendages. That’s the entire point: Masquerading as human, despite the fact that the lead character is, in fact, an octopus. Not a walking, talking octopus… just an octopus doing its best to mimic human behavior despite getting about on suckers and “speaking” through a series of comical cartoon mumbles.

From this nonsensical basic premise the entirety of the game unfolds—both the action and the story. Players guide the deceptive patriarchal protagonist through a series of increasingly contrived scenarios, doing their best to perform basic daily human tasks without giving away their hero’s true nature. Octodad loves his life as an alleged human, but he knows his identity is only as secure as his ability to stay beneath the proverbial radar. (Or is that sonar?) Though the people in Octodad’s life are cheerfully oblivious to the world around him, they’re also not necessarily friendly toward impostors—a fact that is never far from mind, thanks to the perpetual schemes of sushi chef Fujimoto, who stalks Octodad as if he were the Jean Valjean of the seas, hoping to expose (and presumably butcher) the cunning cephalopod.

Mechanically, Octodad calls back to early indie experimental game projects like QWOP. A 2008 Flash game by Bennett Foddy, QWOP took the concept of rag doll physics to its most ridiculous extreme: Players had to use four keyboard buttons (Q, W, O, and P) to control the four limbs of an Olympic runner. Less a traditional video game than a maddening toy, QWOP translated the autonomic muscle control the majority of people take for granted into separate, consciously controlled tasks. When most of us want to run, we don’t think about it; we automatically shift our center of gravity and move our legs. But what if you had to control each of these actions one by one, with deliberate thought? Suddenly the process of moving—let alone running; let alone winning a race!—becomes a challenge to make your head swim.

Octodad takes the QWOP concept and expands it far beyond a bite-sized attempt to complete a single race. In growing to become the basis of an entire slice-of-life adventure, the limb-by-limb control mechanics take on a less complex form (not to mention a less infuriating one). At the same time, they gain considerable nuance, allowing players to do far more than simply move around. Octodad can shuffle through 3D spaces, climb obstacles, manipulate objects, and even play games within the game. Dadliest Catch takes the fumbling rag doll controls of interactive physics toys and turns them into the basis of a game whose emergent inanity is every bit as hilarious as its extensive tongue-in-cheek voiced dialogue.

As much as Octodad appears to owe to QWOP and other rag doll physics sims, its development team has acknowledged many other influences on the game. Foremost among these is Jurassic Park: Trespasser, one of gaming’s most infamous examples of good intentions gone awry. Published in 1998 by Electronic Arts and produced by Seamus Blackley, who would go on to become the father of the Xbox and a world-renowned bread expert, Trespasser dropped players into a first-person survival adventure on an island dominated by dinosaurs. Rather than simply asking them to shoot their way to safety, Trespasser instead gave them a direct connection to the world using complex physics programming and a highly interactive arm through which their on-screen avatar could manipulate and interact with in-game objects (weapons, tools, doors, and more), the idea being to create a profound sense of immersion and a virtual reality-like experience of exploration and danger decades before commercial VR became a reality.

In practice, this setup proved to be clumsy at best and turned Trespasser into something of a running joke. But Octodad developer Young Horses, a studio made up primarily of the former DePaul University students who had created the original Octodad, had a brainstorm: If Trespasser’s granular limb interface had been the source of unintentional comedy, could something similar be harnessed for deliberate comedy? And so we have Octodad, a game where you control three of the main character’s limbs at once; a game where the comical slipperiness of the interface is the point of the affair.

Dadliest Catch gives the dual analog controls of the PlayStation 4 and Vita a proper workout. You manipulate Octodad’s “legs”—or rather, the appendages he’s stuffed down his trouser legs—by pressing the shoulder triggers; each trigger controls a separate leg. Meanwhile, you tap into the spirit of Trespasser with the right analog stick, which raises and lowers the height of the limb Octodad uses to approximate a human arm. Finally, tying it all together, the left analog stick controls the forward, backward, and lateral motion of whichever limb you’re currently operating. Pressing forward causes that limb to tilt forward; pulling back causes it to move backward. If you’re manipulating all three limbs, they all respond simultaneously to the movement of the left stick—and the degree to which you’re fiddling with each of the triggers and the right stick also factors in as well.

If this sounds complicated, well, that’s by design—it’s meant to be complicated. In stark defiance of the general rule of thumb that game controls should be intuitive and friendly and easy to use, Octodad earns most of its traction (and most of its appeal) from the fact that the controls are awful and confusing and hard to use. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

It helps that the game doesn’t take itself at all seriously. The environments are littered with interactive objects, many of which make no sense. The game opens with a flashback to the wedding of Octodad and the love of his life, a human environmental activist named Scarlet. You need to find and don various bits of Octodad’s tuxedo before completing the ceremony, but you also need to make your way down the aisle to where Scarlet awaits without causing so much ruckus you reveal your inhuman nature. Never mind that walking down the aisle usually works the other way around; the aisle is inexplicably littered with banana peels.

The idiocy of this scenario is your warning to buckle in for an adventure that makes very little effort to operate under any rules but its own. Everyone loves Octodad, most of all his family, but they’re all a little suspicious of his strange behavior. This of course raises the question of how he became an Octodad in the first place without Scarlet catching on to his basic nature; you’d think she might have noticed a few details amiss at some point during the whole process involved in Octodad becoming a dad… twice. But you’re really not meant to think that hard about this game.

Instead, you’re meant to focus on navigating one outlandish scenario after the other. After making your way down the aisle, you go full Trespasser in order to place an oversized novelty diamond ring on Scarlet’s finger before fast-forwarding a decade to a seemingly normal morning in Octodad’s domestic life. You need to make coffee, grill lunch, perform yard work, and sort out the grocery shopping throughout the first few stages, all while powering through comically taxing situations for which Octodad’s freakish biology is simultaneously perfectly suited and yet ill equipped to handle. Grab a frozen pizza from inside a busted freezer case by slipping up and down along the shelving? Climb a tower of soft drink boxes to snag the one bottle of mango soda circling around on a display prop overhead? Pilfer a box of cereal from another customer’s cart while she’s not looking? All in a day’s work for an octopus that pretends to be a man.

A big part of what makes Dadliest Catch work is the fact that the developers clearly put a lot of effort into creating friction between the preposterous tasks and elaborate physics yet also knew when to reel things in. The trials and tribulations of Octodad would be hellish if the game expected precision play on par with QWOP and Trespasser, but the controls and in-game interactions both have a generous amount of forgiveness and automation built into them. For example, placing Scarlet’s wedding band on her finger could have required pinpoint-perfect aim, but as long as you can make the ring collide with her hand, you’re fine. Octodad has the ability to snatch objects with his suckers, and the user interface considerately highlights the things you’re about to snatch, which makes it much easier to wiggle your appendage into the proper position to make the grab.

By the time you reach the aquarium’s entertainment zone, where you need to win redemption game prizes for Scarlet or swap electrical plugs to illuminate a giant fish sculpture for your daughter, the prospect of actually winning a ring toss or a target-shooting game with the multi-limb control systems seems far less overwhelming than you might expect. The game constantly ups its stakes and expectations with each new chapter and flashback, but the difficulty curve is both gradual and forgiving. Eventually, you’ll find yourself playing through an interactive flashback where you slide around on a slippery storm-tossed boat deck, trying to avoid pitching overboard as you fend off the advances of Chef Fujimoto. It can be taxing—but it’s far from impossible.

Dadliest Catch presents players with two kinds of challenges: First, there’s the simple task of completing your objectives despite a control scheme that’s uncooperative by design. There can be some sticky moments, when Octodad’s rubbery appendages become entangled with crates and cables and you’re forced to extricate yourself slowly, one limb at a time.

There’s also a secondary consideration, which turns Dadliest Catch into something akin to a stealth game: Avoiding the scrutiny of actual humans. Too much fumbling and failure and the complacent citizens of suburbia will suddenly realize they’ve been infiltrated by an oceanic invader. But here, too, the game errs on the side of generosity. You really have to screw up in order to earn a game over, even when you’re fumbling about the boat deck in plain sight of vigilant sailors.

In fact, by the end of the game, there’s no getting around the fact that Octodad will be exposed for what he is in public. It’s an impostor syndrome nightmare writ large—all the worse for the fact Octodad truly is an impostor in this world.

Or is he? After all, his wife loves him, his children adore him, and he provides them with a comfortable home. Sure, he may be a fake human, but he’s 100% an authentic father.

The other major source of inspiration Young Horses has cited for Octodad isn’t a game at all but rather a movie: Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s surreal masterpiece Being John Malkovich. There, John Cusack and Cameron Diaz’s characters find a hidden portal that takes them inside the mind of actor John Malkovich, and their experiences inside another person’s head—wearing Malkovich’s body—informed the awkwardness and discomfort that permeate Octodad: Dadliest Catch. It’s a short game, strongly driven by story as it propels players from one objective to the next, but it’s long on personality. The constant stream of running dialogue from the characters around you moves the story along and defines the more-or-less silent protagonist and his family alike.

It’s an endearing little game: Engrossing on its first play through while encouraging replay with dozens of hidden neckties to collect. It embodies the spirit of indie gaming, with wacky controls, loads of charm, and graphics that compensate with their relative simplicity by surreally planting a disguised octopus smack dab in the middle of the pastoral American suburban dream. It’s the same sort of whimsy that would also define Young Horses’ follow-up project, 2020’s quirky collection-adventure game Bugsnax.

While Octodad: Dadliest Catch has appeared on practically every gaming platform of the past decade, Limited Run Games specifically published both the PlayStation 4 and Vita versions as catalog releases 10 and 11. The PS4 release is notable for being Limited Run’s first flirtation with the Collector’s Edition concept—customers could opt to buy the PlayStation 4 release in a special bundle that included a custom nautical necktie in embroidered silk, produced by Fangamer.