It’s hard to put into words just how creative and charming A Fisherman’s Tale truly is, but allow me to try. Simply put, this is a high concept VR presentation oozing all the confidence of French design while telling a fun little tale of father-son redemption. The story starts off innocently enough; you play as Bob, a fisherman and lighthouse keeper who lives a simple and repetitive life. You wake every day, brush your teeth, stoke the wood burning stove, dust your favorite seashell, and gaze longingly out the window. These are all actual activities you will pantomime using VR motion controls.
In the center of your room is a perfectly detailed scaled model of the lighthouse and your cabin with a removable roof that reveals your real-world surroundings in perfect miniaturized detail. It’s almost too real as events about to unfold will reveal. The next day when you wake up you feel something isn’t right, and upon opening the window you find yourself actually in the model you were working on yesterday. Yes, you have become the puppet fisherman trapped in some twisted paradox of a model within a model within a model where all actions and reactions are perfect synced.
This multi-layered reality is pretty much the core around the next two hours of gameplay, in both exploring and puzzle solving. There was definitely an Alice in Wonderland vibe with all the big and small scale swapping. For instance, once you get a storm warning over the radio your primary mission is to get to the top of the lighthouse and light it up. The door to your room is blocked with a giant anchor, much too big to move, but that same anchor is also inside the model, and removing it from there also removes it in your world. The back and forth between the model and the real-world is super-creative allowing for some inspiring and satisfying puzzle design.
At one point you need a tiny captain’s cap but you only have a real-size version. Putting that cap on the table in your room will also make it appear inside the model in miniature. Putting a small seashell into the model makes a giant one appear in your room. Admittedly, most of the puzzle design does focus on scaling items larger or smaller, but there are also clever environmental puzzles that transcend multiple levels of size. One puzzle has you taking a tiny ladder from the model and putting it on the sink mirror in your current reality/size, then going to the even larger reality to actually use that ladder. Confused? I told you this game was hard to put into words.
Honestly, I’m not sure A Fisherman’s Tale would even be possible without VR – certainly not nearly as immersive – with fantastic visuals and some excellent motion controls. I played on both the Vive and the Rift and the experiences were near identical. The Touch felt a bit more comfortable interacting with objects, but the Vive offers native room-scale support, which definitely helps with some puzzles as well as maintaining accurate tracking if you get turned around. I only have two Rift sensors, so I was occasionally getting the message about facing the sensors; usually right after my VR hands started to spasm and I dropped objects. Thankfully, lost items reappear in their original location after a few moments. The game is a delight on either system, so you can’t go wrong.
A Fisherman’s Tale is more of an interactive story with a soothing French-accent narration and delightful voiceovers for a few interesting characters that will help you along the way. The whole thing will last about two hours and given the comfort level of this VR experience you can easily finish in a single session. There is probably another hour or so for those wanting to find all the hidden pearls and tackle some side-challenges to earn all 29 achievements. 
I’m still not sure why they made the fisherman a puppet. That never factors into the story or the puzzles and honestly, if it weren’t for the strings coming off his hands you’d never know. It’s not like you are playing the game using marionette controls. Regardless, I had a blast with this game, and A Fisherman’s Tale has quickly secured the honor of best VR game of 2019…so far. The story is interesting, and the puzzles are challenging to a degree of satisfaction I wouldn’t expect from a casual experience. Once you grasp the concept of how the three scaled worlds interact with each other the whole game just clicks leaving you to the wondrous exploration of this magical universe that defies logic and sometimes even physics. A Fisherman’s Tale is available for all Rift, Vive, and PSVR, and if you own any of these VR systems you owe it to yourself to play this game.
