Wednesday 1 August 2012

Indie Games: Octodad


Octodad, by The DePaul Game Experience, is one of the strangest games I’ve ever seen and I love it. You play as the eponymous Octodad, an octopus trying to appear as a human by donning a suit. You have to appear as human as octopusly possible (forgive me) to your family by doing chores and helping them out.

This would be simple enough, except because you are an octopus you can’t really walk properly or move your arms with any precision. How does this comes across in the game? Well, to walk you have to use left -click to move your left leg and right-click to move your right leg. Oh, and that’s if you are in feet mode. In hands mode you move around your arm, using left-click to pick things up and right click to move your arm more freely.

With these awful, terrible controls you have to do things like do the dishes, get a book for your daughter or score a goal with a football. These mundane tasks are made somewhat challenging by the controls and this is brilliant. As much as the controls suck this is the point of the game and with the game built around the controls sucking the entire experience is so much fun.

The humour of the game is spot on as well, using the concept well without overdoing it. This adds to the experience and just makes the game so much more worth playing. Alongside this, we also have a brilliant art style that just makes things look great and at times adds to the humour.

Download this game as soon as you can. It’s about 30 minutes long and is extremely fun to play. You might get frustrated with the controls at first but you get to know them and work them well enough. Octodad is one of those bizarre gems that needs to be more widely known and with a sequel coming out (possibly on Steam) it may get the recognition it deserves.

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A Note On Ratings

This system is now defunct as I no longer use ratings. However, this is kept here just for older reviews.

I honestly believe that with a 10-point scale you can't gain everything from a review, however this is an easy way to quickly gauge my feelings as well as useful for comparisons.

Some reviews using the 10-point scale like to have 7 as an average for their reviews, however I prefer to use 5 as an average. The following also shows the colour coding I use:

0: May well be the worst thing ever made. Ever.
1-3: It's not good. At all.
4-6:: It's pretty much average. Not good, but not bad.
7-9: It's pretty good, with hardly any faults.
10: It's damn near perfect and may as well have been made by God!