![]() Even beyond the screen, physical games like Twister, Jenga, and KerPlunk often work along the same lines - both your successes and your failures are framed in absurdity and whether you win or lose it's nearly impossible to keep a straight face. Consider games like Surgeon Simulator, QWOP, and (to a lesser extent) current viral hit Flappy Bird. This slapstick stress-relief isn't unique to Octodad, but instead a core aspect of what makes clumsy gameplay so damn fun. In essence, you're a deep-sea Charlie Chaplin, and that takes the sting away from almost every failure. You don't fall on spikes, you don't lose your coins - usually, you just flop around and do something ridiculous. Failing in something like Octodad isn't the same as failing in any other game. You'll have to excuse me for the salty (puns!) language, but awkward controls can lead to a lot of frustration.Īt the same time, that frustration rarely kept me from enjoying the game. Last night I streamed Octodad: Dadliest Catch on my channel (alongside my friend Austin Walker), and I assembled some of the very best clips into the video above. Why? Because even at its most frustrating, it's good old fashioned slapstick fun. The idea that a game could be anything but terrible if even skilled players can manage little more than comical flailing is counter-intuitive, and yet this kind of clumsy gameplay has become phenomenally popular. She watched the character flapping and flopping about, desperately fumbling his way through a grocery store, then chuckled and said to me, "Oh, that doesn't look very good." This is probably why when my game-loving mom first saw footage of Kickstarter success story Octodad: Dadliest Catch, she was not impressed. ![]() Bad control and bad gameplay are practically synonymous because one almost always accompanies the other, so it can be hard to imagine eking any kind of sincere enjoyment out of them. Not impossible in terms of it's difficulty or challenge, but purely in terms of its controls. It's hard to explain the fun of a game that's ridiculously (and intentionally) impossible. Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
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