I've had a minor epiphany about Z-Games of late. Z-Games, which is another one of my wonderful nomenclature creations destined to be picked up by no-one, refers to deliberately bad joke games that - at the same time - at least retain some kernel of wit, craft or ingenuity at its core to separate it from the actual garbage out there that infests Steam's new releases ticker on an hourly basis. A good recent example would be that Getting Over It game, which I'm in no hurry to tear my hair out over, or the infamous jogging simulator QWOP or the catawampus ballet that is Goat Simulator - games that have a certain degree of competency and care given to their construction, but aren't trying to kid the audience about the nature of their abysmal gameplay: it's evident very quickly that some game designers were messing around with physics and controls and hit upon something that delighted them to no end, and recreated it for a shenanigan-happy audience that would share in the humor of their accidental messy buffoonery.

However, there are two ways to go about this kind of game effectively: either create a open playground with no clear goals, eschewing the usual system of escalating challenges with the game engine/controls for a standard difficulty curve given that no-one in their right mind is going to want to "master" a busted-ass game or, in rare cases like Getting Over It, double-down on the idea of failure as an inevitability and write a series of witty dialogue clips to assuage the frustration players will no doubt be feeling trying to make their way through all these nigh-impossible goals with wonky controls, thereby making the game really about that Sisyphean journey rather than the destination. Octodad: Dadliest Catch, unfortunately, takes neither of these routes and in the process makes a grievous error with its design philosophy: a serious game (structurally, if not thematically) with a distinctly unserious multi-limbed klutzy control scheme.

Born from a student project that was distributed for free across the internet, Dadliest Catch is the maturation of that original student game; the Super Meat Boy to their Meat Boy, as it were. In addition to fleshing out the barebones story - an octopus escapes the sea, learns to walk on land, ends up falling in love with and subsequently marrying an uncharacteristically oblivious photojournalist, and somehow fathering two human children, all the while attempting to elude a particularly obstinate sushi chef with a dubious Japanese accent - it also expanded and improved on the world design, added a significant variation to the challenges Octodad must face in doing everyday human things without arising suspicion, brought in a full voice cast (Octodad simply makes subtitled blubbing noises with useful added context for his emotional state), and crafted a catchy theme song even. There's a lot about the game's goofs and incidental dialogue I found very charming, and the simple acts of moving around and interacting with the world can be pretty funny to watch.

But then at some point, around the trip to the Aquarium, Dadliest Catch tries to be a real game. You realize that the mostly impossible to lose early chapters, where you're grilling burgers and pulling weeds in the garden of your Fallout-style 1950s suburban home while throwing everything on the floor in the process, wasn't just for the sake of setting the game's lighthearted tone but to give you some much-needed practice for when the calamari hits the fryer. Once you reach the Aquarium, and the latter half of the game begins, you're regularly trying to evade ichthyologists (the only humans that won't be fooled by your suit and tie) and taking part in challenging arcade games and obstacle courses that rely on co-ordination and precision - two facets that the game's controls are woefully ill-equipped to provide. It's at this point where the game becomes a slog, as due to the linear nature of the game's story every challenge is compulsory and only very few offer shortcuts (reaching inside a claw machine with your long tentacles, for instance) for the impatient. There was a few sequences in particular where I definitely felt close to throwing in the towel - Kelp World being an especially irritating example. What's strange is that the game has a wide set of achievement challenges and collectibles to pursue in addition, almost all of which require absolute mastery of the game to pull off.

That suggests to me that they didn't see their uncontrollable octopus game as a silly exercise in goofing around while ostensibly completing various tasks with nothing but grit and grace, but a game that you were meant to take at least somewhat seriously in order to see it through to the conclusion of its story. A game that you were meant to practice at until you got the various limb controls down pat and could start chasing some of those bonus objectives. A game that would be a frustrating mess rather than a frivolous diversion if, say, you were ever required to traverse a set of narrow planks without falling off or earn a high enough score at a whack-a-mole game within a strict time limit. I'll have to once again toss in the "bad PC" chestnut here as well, as this laptop is definitely not happy when given anything 3D to run - the resulting profound input lag and framey-ness did nothing to alleviate the many vexations Octodad throws your way. It's definitely the worst video game experience I've had this year, though I suppose that's not much of a proclamation when we're only 18 days in.

In some ways I can empathise with the developers. How do you adapt a fun but silly little student game into a fully-featured professional product that people would pay money for? It would have to involve something more substantial than a presentation facelift and a few more tasks for ol' Cephalo-Pop to accomplish. However, I can't help but feel like they focused on the wrong areas and misunderstood the original game's core appeal. I'm not quite sure something as completely freeform and rudderless as Goat Simulator would've necessarily worked either, but there had to have been a happy medium between dopey chaos and trying to perform brain surgery while drunk and on fire. My hope is that they one day revisit this gem of a concept and get it right, though I'm not entirely sure it's possible - it could just be that the idea of an octopus pretending to be human just doesn't have the legs. Meanwhile, I gotta figure out if my enthusiasm for the structurally similar Human Fall Flat has dampened sufficiently to take it off the schedule...

Rating: 2 out of 5.