Test: A Fisherman's Tale for Oculus Quest

Bob is a wooden fisherman's dummy who lives in a tiny fisherman's hut from whose perspective, or rather multiple perspectives, you must make it to the top floor of a lighthouse to respond to a radio storm warning. Vertigo Games and Innerspace VR have now released the VR puzzle adventure "A Fisherman's Tale" at the end of November for the Oculus Quest published. Published the distorted reality game was released in January 2019 and has since been available for PlayStation VR, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality. We have taken a closer look at the fairy tale, which even comes with a German audio track, for you.

Once upon a time there was a cottage and in it another cottage ...

"A Fisherman's Tale" comes from Vertigo Games, the team behind Arizona Sunshine and Skyworld, and was supported by Innerspace VR developed in co-production with Arte France and with the support of CNC, Ville de Paris New Media Fund and BPI France. The game principle? You are a little inside the doll's house, but you can experience yourself from several perspectives. The highlight: there is also another house inside the doll's house. When you look through the window, you suddenly become aware of a larger version of yourself. This seems confusing at first, but it is a central game component in the puzzle adventure in the brilliant children's book comic style.

What is it about? The aim of the game is to light the lighthouse. To do this, however, you first have to make it to the top and overcome all kinds of obstacles along the way. For those who don't know "A Fisherman's Tale" yet, I'll briefly summarise the game principle at this point: You have to find various objects and put them in place to open up a new section of the game. For example, you might find a funny hat for a crab in a bookshelf that is hiding a key in its hatching shell. Once you have to tear out a whole wall at the lighthouse so that the wall fish, which is fixed as a trophy, can find its way back to its cold water. But I don't want to tell you all the puzzles right now.

Tell me, Muse, the deeds of the much-wandered man

In doing so, you are confronted again and again with the size paradigms of your surroundings. Does the big ladder have room somewhere in a scaled-down form so that you can enter another space-time continuum? Are there other ways to fish wreckage out of the lake as small building blocks to fit onto a model that you can then scale up again? With questions like these, you are challenged again and again.

Fortunately, the voice of a narrator and the curious characters always accompany you. New clues also reveal themselves when you take a closer look at a certain area. The puzzles are moderately difficult to easy. However, it can happen that you don't make progress for a while. In this case, it is worth inspecting the surroundings again and again and mentally fantasising with the dimensions or holding an object in several places until a new clue suddenly brings light into the darkness. All this happens in a 360-degree view with simple point-and-click technology. The game is therefore also very well suited for beginners who have not yet experienced so much in virtual reality.

The goal of the VR fairy tale is to get inside the lighthouse via the four chapters and finally to the top. But first you have to make it through all the leaks and obstacles. A small sailor's adventure with a ship is also part of the game. But we don't want to give too much away. The game lasts about an hour if you can solve all the puzzles in one go. But we liked the special fairytale parlour charm.

Very good Oculus Quest implementation

What can you say about the Oculus Quest version? I also compared the edition with the PC VR version on an HTC Vive Cosmos. In general, the contours look much sharper on the PC. But since the game makes do with few polygons and there are no special lighting effects, the differences are hardly noticeable, even if someone has played A Fisherman's Tale before. The game is actually perfectly suited for the Oculus Quest and we can make out practically no shortcomings compared to the original.