Another Fisherman’s Tale review – fishing for puzzles

Another Fisherman’s Tale – there’s no getting away from it, this is an odd game (pic: Vertigo Games)

One of the most original VR puzzle games of recent years gets a sequel, where you play a puppet pirate with detachable limbs.

A Fisherman’s Tale told the story of a wooden puppet lighthouse keeper stuck in a recursive world of model lighthouses. Its sequel takes a similarly meta approach, in a narrative about a woman packing up the bric-a-brac in her dad’s basement after his death; her mum, whom you don’t see but hear over an intercom system, is suffering from advancing dementia, her reality not quite matching the one you see.

While that’s a bleakly depressing premise, the game and its storytelling are anything but. As you box up the dad’s paraphernalia, the model boat and puppet fisherman he made come to life with the stories he used to tell, the basement and its junk taking on epic proportions as you shrink down to play as Bob, a fisherman with distinctly piratical leanings.

Narrated in a loveably over-zee-top French accent, Bob’s adventures involve his attempts to reach Libertalia, the mythical Madagascan pirate colony; a quest that’s thwarted at every turn by Captain Kenred, his apparent arch-nemesis. Moment-to-moment though, you’ll be solving puzzles, hunting sunken treasure, and trying to figure out exactly what the game wants from you in each of its quite different levels.

Its central conceit is the fact that you’re a puppet, letting you freely dismantle parts of your body without suffering the usual effects of sudden traumatic amputation. That means you can fire out a hand to grab a useful item that’s out of reach or disconnect it completely, replacing it with a more useful appendage. That could be a hook for grappling Bob up to high places or a lobster claw to slice through a piece of rope.

Your head isn’t exempt from this process and once detached it can act as a key for certain locks, and also gives you the ability to view surroundings from new vantage points. You can continue to pilot your headless body and remote control hands from your head’s separate location, a process that takes some getting used to.

Every puzzle has a hint for each of its phases, Bob repeating a sentence designed to lead you towards the next part of your goal. Sometimes that’s helpful, but more often it simply reinforces the fact that you have absolutely no idea what you’re supposed to be doing. That leads to prolonged moments of frustration as you wander round and round its relatively claustrophobic environments, in search of the one thing you were supposed to do but missed.

Given that the game lasts around four hours total, those moments of being adrift don’t go on for long, but they can certainly feel like it. You’ll also find that not all its puzzles are equal in terms of your ability to solve them. The first few levels rely on navigating your hands into obscure corners, to grab hidden puzzle solving items. These are clever, fun, and demand just the right level of dexterity to make success feel like a decent victory.

Some others though, just don’t work as they should, with the PlayStation VR2’s hand tracking proving to be a particular bugbear. For the original PlayStation VR that was understandable, the old PlayStation Move controllers never really being up to the task of accurate 3D tracking. But there’s less excuse for getting it wrong on PlayStation 5, since the Sense controllers work more or less seamlessly in plenty of other games.

One level in particular, where you equip a mechanical hand that lets you control a nearby cargo crane, that’s supposed to make the same movements as your hand, is so unwieldy we actually came close to giving up. There’s another right near the end that suffers in the same way, although thanks to its lower complexity it wasn’t quite as infuriating.

Another Fisherman’s Tale – of course there’s a kraken in it (pic: Vertigo Games)

There are times when everything works swimmingly. In your exploration of the deep you end up swapping your legs for a fish tail, which in an underwater environment is essentially like flying, your trajectory controlled by angling your palms, Iron Man-style. Combined with the usual VR teleportation mechanic, it makes getting around the place a joyous process.

You might still get stuck on a puzzle but being able to shoot around the environment at will, hovering, investigating, and teleporting to save time gives a sense of freedom and involvement that’s special to VR. That’s also evident when you crane your neck to look inside one of the game’s puzzle areas, as you navigate a dismembered puppet hand towards a lost cog or useful hand upgrade.

The story’s melancholy is nicely offset by Bob’s joviality and, like its puzzles, you’re left to infer your own interpretation for much of it. It’s can feel very disjointed, though, which you could argue fits the themes of the game but too often comes across as just a lack of quality control.

Between the hit and miss levels, and graphics that have a chunky, Duplo-esque charm, it’s hard to believe this is the same hardware that plays host to Resident Evil Village. Even so, in some areas Another Fisherman’s Tale is impressively clever and innovative; in others it’s a bit of a letdown, the control system and level design failing to work as intended.

As with a lot of VR games, Another Fisherman’s Tale doesn’t feel completely finished; it’s short on content, lacks polish, and at times feels actually broken. The moments where everything works, and the first three levels in particular, demonstrate the huge potential of the setting, storytelling and the puzzles that inhabit it. It’s a pity that promise isn’t fulfilled by the rest of the game.

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