Have you ever dreamed of being a 300 foot cephalopod? To have the amazing destructive power of squid based kaiju? To use that awesome power for menial labor and helping your community? Well dear reader, Tentacular is for you.
If that doesn’t make it clear, Tentacular is a VR game where you play as a giant octopus or squid (the game isn’t exactly clear on which) that upon its sweet 16 must get a real job and become an active member of society. What job do you give a tentacled kaiju? Well honestly they’re not sure either. So they just kind of throw everything at you.
From repairing buildings to knocking them down with a giant slingshot, it’s up to you to use your massive tentacles to interact with the environment and solve whatever minigame or puzzle they need you to do at the moment. It’s a pretty simple game, basically just grabbing things and/or chucking them extremely far distances, but it’s incredibly fun!
The simplicity is elevated by the massive scale of you and your tentacles in comparison to the rest of the world. It’s incredibly gratifying to be able to just lift giant slabs of concrete or even buildings up by their bases. Then slam them into the ground like a kid playing with toys. Even with that scale the controls are very precise, you can pick up anything and you never feel that you are grabbing something other than you or the game wants you to. You can easily pick a person out of a boat instead of just grabbing the boat. You can grab the boat and send it in to the stratosphere too, don’t worry.
All of this makes the puzzles the games throw at you that much more fun. It’s a joy to mess around the environment and figure out exactly what you need to do. And if you get frustrated or mess something else you can go full kaiju, destroy as much as you can and reset the level. No fuss. Tentacular above everything wants you to have fun.
That’s why in addition to levels there’s an active city you can mess around in. Mess up traffic if you want. Smash up the local Game Stomp. Pet a dog. Grab whatever your sticky suction cups can hold on too. Oh, and if that’s not enough there’s also a playground where you can build and destroy contraptions by generating props from the main game and doing whatever a giant cephalopod’s three hearts desire.
You can pet the dog!
All of this is neatly tied together by a surprisingly sweet and fun plot, where you find your place in the world. It is completely devoted to it’s setup and setting and even starts to go in some interesting places you might not expect.
All in all, Tentacular is a joy to play. It’s simple, but it brings so much to the table in pure fun you don’t really mind. If you have a VR headset check it out when it comes out later this spring. I give it two tentacles up!
