You know how when you hold up one mirror in front of another one you can see yourself reflected into infinity? Well, A Fisherman’s Tale is a bit like that but with added Sou’westers, puppets and talking crustaceans.
This odd but charming mixture of narrative adventure and physics puzzler does its best to entertain and there are some lovely moments in here that demonstrate the wondrous possibilities of VR. Sadly the incredibly short run time means that A Fisherman’s Tale’s inventive and original premise ends up feeling rather underdeveloped. There’s a potential for greatness here but it’s not quite reached and instead of thinking “Wow, that was great!”, when I finished the game, it was more a case of, “Wow, was that it?!”.
If you’d like to see the game in action, you can catch a glimpse of me playing the first two levels of A Fisherman’s Tale in this week’s episode of Ian’s VR Corner. Oh, and if you don’t get the little visual gag and song at the start, congratulations, you’re not old!
Will A Fisherman’s Tale leave you hooked? – Ian’s VR Corner Watch on YouTube
A Fisherman’s Tale casts you as a puppet, a replica of a real-life fisherman that lives inside a scale model of a lighthouse. On a table inside this lighthouse is a replica model of your own lighthouse, which you soon find out is home to a smaller version of you. Your lighthouse also exists on a table in a larger model of the lighthouse and that replica is also home to an equally large version of your fisherman, and so on and so on.
Confused yet? Well you should be because this is where the reality-breaking puzzle elements come into play.
Lift the roof off of the model lighthouse in your reality and the first thing you’ll notice is the roof above you being torn off too, revealing the giant version of yourself towering over you. Stick your finger into the model below you and wiggle it about in front of the tiny fisherman’s face and a giant finger will appear from above and tickle your own nose. Every action you take in your reality is mirrored in the replications above and below you and by passing items back and forth between them, you can increase or decrease their size in order to unlock ways to proceed up the lighthouse tower.
The press release for A Fisherman’s Tale makes this sound way more complex and exciting than it actually is though. , it states. This is an over-exaggeration though. You’ll never go more than one layer above or below yourself so the potential for interacting with infinite versions of your character just never truly materialises.