A FISHERMAN’S TALE
A game worth pulling some strings for
The biggest, best trick PS VR pulls off is making you forget the world outside the headset exists. That those PS Move-controlled hands in front of you aren’t really your hands. That you probably shouldn’t stride confidently forward into that shin-height corner of the coffee table. As convincing as it is, the technology isn’t perfect, and every now and then something will inevitably break the spell. When it does, the sense of disconnect hits much harder than in a normal videogame. A Fisherman’s Tale chooses to steer right into that mental tidal wave, putting the artifice front and centre.
See, you’re not playing the fisherman the title promises, exactly, but a puppet of one. Your floating wooden hands have visible points of articulation along the fingers. There’s a button you can press to send one of them shooting forward to grab something out of reach. You can even see the strings being pulled to make them move. It’s all a constant reminder these aren’t really your hands.
PUPPET PEEVE
There are plenty of other reminders that the world you can see is not real which are, unfortunately, less intentional. PS Move detection can be a bit wobbly, and your hands will often pass through an item or bit of level geometry, causing whatever you’re carrying to ping off into the distance. Which is frustrating, given the entire game revolves around picking stuff up and moving it to another place. Doubly so, because the stuff you’re handling is often tiny.
The puzzles in A Fisherman’s Tale all revolve around the idea that you’re a puppet who has built a model of the lighthouse he lives in, with a tiny puppet version of yourself inside. Lift the roof off the model, look up, and you’ll glimpse a giant wooden hand swooping overhead. It’s puppets all the way down, and items can be dragged from one plane of reality to the next, embiggening – or indeed debigulating – them to fit the task at, ahem, hand. The game plays wonderfully with scale and this worlds-within-worlds setup, forcing you to recalibrate your brain. You won’t forget that the world you’re interacting with isn’t real, but for the most part – when you’re not struggling against your misbehaving hands, that is – that’s all part of the fun.
VERDICT
A smart, charming game that makes the most of PS VR for puzzles, but never quite cuts the strings of its technical limitations. Alex Spencer