Incarnate as a giant monster and ravage the human city, which is not a rare bridge in the game. Sometimes, just a "condescending" perspective can allow players to experience a completely different kind of fun. But games like "Tentacle Craftsman", which "force" players to become monsters and have to find a decent job, may not be so common —
And obviously, letting a "monster" work itself sounds weird.
Tentacle Craftsman is one such VR game. In the game, the player takes on the role of a giant sea monster (presumably a giant octopus, I guess) who, with his human sister, lives in an archipelago community surrounded by the sea. Here, all citizens over the age of 16 must take an oath to the community and fulfill their responsibilities as citizens. But most of the inhabitants here didn't seem to welcome the giant weird creature — until it was at work and stumbled upon a weird alien spaceship.
Entering the game, you will immediately find that, apart from telling a very "DreamWorks" story with levels and gameplay, Tentacle Craftsman is not as special as it seems. Although the whole game is played from the perspective of a "monster", you can always see the shadow of other well-known VR games on it.
Because of its size, players need to stand on the surface of the sea to communicate with humans, and the various islands are small sandbox levels. As for its actual gameplay, perhaps as long as I say the keywords "physical sandbox" and "hand simulator", you can probably guess one or two.
In fact, "sandbox decryption" is also one of the most popular game types in the market in recent years. Take the previously acclaimed "The Mystery of the Stolen Pet" or "Falling down the Rabbit Hole", for example, they all tell their own unique stories with a series of independent scene puzzles. In terms of appearance, "Tentacle Craftsman" is obviously more like the former, but rather than spending a lot of effort to build scenes and puzzles, its makers decided to focus on the game's focus on "playing".
Note that I'm not trying to say that Tentacles didn't bother with the concept of a sandbox or the style of the picture, it's just that its puzzles aren't attached to the "sandbox." In many scenes of the game, the player can not move freely, according to the pixel style of the rendered screen, there will not be too much freshness and stunning, so "physics" naturally becomes the core of the gameplay of this game.
For most of the game, the sea monster is a cargo porter who also works as a garbage cleaner, house construction, building blaster, scientific experiments, and even aerial rocket launches, and whether it is carefully stacking containers together or assembling rockets that can ascend smoothly, the flexible use of both hands, or "two tentacles", is undoubtedly a necessary skill.
As a sea monster with giant tentacles, you naturally can't rely on the "five fingers" to grab objects like humans. Instead, the suction cups are more powerful and malleable. With the help of the VR controller capture function, the player needs to use the suction cups on the tentacles to perform various pre-set work goals, and you must also overcome the obstacles caused by the laws of physics psychologically and physically, just like most "hand simulator" games will require.
I say this because most "hand simulators" like to rely on difficult and awkward operations to challenge the limits of players. Fortunately, "Tentacle Craftsman" does not mean to create a half-body sea monster in VR games, although you still need to face the irritability of the tentacles "uncontrolled" or "randomly grasping" at some points, but in general, the suction cups that can be controlled with just one trigger are still much more comfortable than the simulated hands with five fingers.
Interestingly, under the game mechanics of Tentacle Craftsman, "tentacles" are not just a simple concept. The biggest feature of this work is also in this. In the game, players can use different parts of the tentacles to grab items, depending on the part you are using, the effect of grabbing will be very different.
This is a concept that is more difficult to describe in words, and you can understand it this way: because the tentacle itself has a certain softness, the force of the part from the top of the tentacle will be relatively weak, and if you want to grasp a heavier object, you must use the lower part of the tentacle; conversely, if you want to throw something farther, you must use the upper half. This kind of "division of labor" based on the characteristic design of the tentacles, although it does not seem so reasonable, but in the face of a variety of physical effects, this feature really provides some fun for simple grasping operations.
Since the tentacles have such characteristics, the level puzzles in the game naturally need to be designed based on "picking up", "putting down" or "grabbing". As the protagonist of the giant sea monster, both architect and rocket launcher, sometimes, you need to honestly pile up various building materials into a shape, and sometimes, you need to use the wire as a slingshot leather band to stage a "tentacle version of Angry Birds".
If you ask me if these puzzles are fun, I can basically give you an answer in the affirmative. Because these gameplay themselves have long been verified, but for a game with "tentacles" in the title, the design of these puzzles does not seem to fully express their own characteristics. Many of these levels only rudely require the player to build a specific shape of building with hand-held things, and because they are afraid that the difficulty of the puzzle is too low, they adjust the difficulty of the level by "limiting the number of materials available".
But you have to say that it is not difficult, in fact, it is not accurate. Although manipulating the two tentacles themselves is not difficult, and the solution to the puzzle itself is relatively unique, not requiring too strong open thinking, but as the level progresses, you will more and more realize that the negative feedback that accompanies the "hand simulator" is actually only weakened, but not completely disappeared.
In the mid-to-late levels, the game increasingly requires players to perform precise manipulations on items. There's nothing wrong with everything being computed through normal laws of physics, but once it starts to involve anti-gravity things like remote-controlled rockets, the game starts to get harder in different directions.
Damn, such cases are not in the minority. Although, as a way to prevent players from getting stuck on the "puzzle", Ben is very kind to provide the most direct help for all the puzzles that need to be "thought"(if you ask for help, it will directly tell you the answer step by step), but if you encounter a problem related to the operation, you can only rely on perseverance to pass.
Of course, if these problems are left aside, Tentacle Craftsman is still a VR game that can be played, especially for those who are just getting started and are not so familiar with VR games.
Because, it is basically a combination of those mature VR gameplay, and it also carries a cute story of déjà vu.