Tentacular Preview

Happy birthday, you’ve just turned 16 and your sister tells you from your lighthouse home that you have to go into the town of La Kalma and get a job. Being the devoted brother, you go right after dunking your cake in the ocean (to put the candle out) and get a job at the junkyard. Unfortunately, on your first day you pull a shipping container free with your tentacles, and your life changes forever… Oh yeah, and you’re a giant squid.

Tentacular is a VR physics puzzle game created by Firepunchd, and I hate them for only giving me a demo. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed what I played immensely, but then it ended! Though to be fair, I can still play around with it — but I digress.

Apologies for the spoiler right at the start of this, but as a giant squid it turns out that your human sister is not your real sister: you were adopted. I know, just because you tower over everyone by a factor of hundreds doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't biologically identical, but as a huge, tentacled sea creature you’re simply not human. This is where Tentacular starts.

The control scheme of Tentacular deviates from the normal “reach out and touch”. Yes, your tentacles can grab things with their suckers, but that also means that your hands are usually nowhere near the thing you have a hold of, they stretch out ahead of you. Bigger things are harder to pick up with the ends of your tentacles, for instance, so you need to secure them with the bigger parts closer to your controllers. It takes some getting used to, especially since your suckers will attach to almost anything they come in contact with while you’re holding the button.

Moving around each level is done via the thumbsticks which I know can give some people motion sickness. I don’t experience that usually, so I cannot say for certain if it would affect you in this game. There’s no “teleportation” method of movement either, just moving yourself around your actual room or using the thumb sticks.

In each level you’re given some tasks to do that only a massive mollusc with the force of a speeding freight train can do. Stack shipping containers, throw rockets through floating rings as a cheap alternative to jet fuel, manually turn the lighthouse… You also get drip-fed the story every now and then, so as not to overwhelm you in what are a bunch of funny situations.

You wind up meeting a scientist who creates these things he calls M.A.G.N.E.T.S. What they do is stick things together — yes, obviously — but they’re some science thing so will stick anything to anything, not just metal, so they’re ideal for construction projects. After a few levels you get to use a machine to change the size of them, so you can select a suitable size depending on what you need to attach to where. Does the task require a tower or a barrier? Does it need multiple tiers?

While I only had a couple of hours’ worth of Tentacular’s story, I was also given access to two sandbox areas. Both give you a M.A.G.N.E.T. dispenser as well as a device that can create any object that you’ve unlocked in the game world, so you can build and create how you like. Just be warned: helicopter propellers hurt.

There are a ton of great touches throughout Tentacular that really show how much thought has gone into the game so far. The town hall roof flips open like a lid, tapping people on the head speeds up the text of what they’re saying, dropping people in water deploys their personal floatation devices… Everything that you need to interact with is giant-sized, from the handles that you need to pull to leave a level to everything in the settings menu. Heck, you can even change how big the tentacles are! Though this option appears to be locked, and is presumably something you can unlock later on in the full game.

While I may hate how little time I got to play with Tentacular, I just think that proves how well Firepunchd has done with it. While I wait for release later this year, I think I’ll just build some kind of arena and throw helicopters at each other. Or exploding barrels at helicopters…