Reality Bytes: Another Fisherman's Tale brings a whole new approach to its mind-bending puzzles
Thrilling as it may be to swing a lightsaber or shoot a headcrab in stereoscopic 3D, the VR experiences I crave most are those which use the tech to fold my brain into entirely new shapes. 2019's A Fisherman's Tale was one of those. An unassuming first-person puzzler about a puppet fisherman living in a lighthouse, it dazzled with its incredible deployment of VR's unique sense of perspective and scale. It's the kind of game that, if it featured a psychotic AI and some cake memes instead of a beard in a yellow anorak, would have been heralded as a revolution in play.
It would have been easy to follow-up A Fisherman's Tale in the same way, make a bigger game with a few new gimmicks and a comedy lobster voiced by Stephen Merchant. But that isn't what developer InnerspaceVR has done. Instead, Another Fisherman's Tale bends your neural pathways in entirely new forms, offering a completely different kind of puzzling. The results are equally innovative and almost as interactively satisfying - although a lack of refinement in the latter category is a deflating puncture in the game's dinghy.