Give Yourself A Hand: ‘Another Fisherman’s Tale’ is Out Now on Meta Quest 2 + Pro

If you replace every single piece of the Fisherman, is he still the same Fisherman?

Another Fisherman’s Tale is out now on Meta Quest 2 + Pro. A follow-up to Vertigo Games and Innerspace VR’s beloved 2019 puzzle game A Fisherman’s Tale, the sequel continues the occasionally unbelievable tall tale of Bob the Fisherman, this time through the eyes of his daughter Nina. Reenact his adventures as a miniature puppet-sized Bob—with the power to detach, throw, and even replace limbs at will.

You’ll have to think “outside the body” as you explore lifelike dioramas of Bob’s escapades and solve devious puzzles by, for instance, replacing your boring human hand with a crab claw. It’s a silly premise, but if you’ve played A Fisherman’s Tale you know there’s doubtless a surprisingly poignant story wrapped around the edges.

We sat down with Another Fisherman’s Tale Game Director Alexis Moroz and Creative Director Balthazar Auxietre to get some more details on how the sequel came to be, using the Ship of Theseus as inspiration, and the importance of playtesting. Read on for more!

Balthazar Auxietre: We hadn’t initially planned a sequel, but when Alexis had the idea of puzzles based on dismantling and rebuilding your own body parts—playing with your avatar as if you were a puppet—we immediately thought it could be a great opportunity to come back to A Fisherman’s Tale through the character of Bob. The gameplay concept was different than in the first one but it felt appropriate to tell the story of Bob after he escaped his lighthouse at the end of A Fisherman’s Tale and how he completely rebuilt himself through that journey.

Alexis Moroz: You’re right, this sequel introduces the character of Nina, Bob’s daughter. We get to know about Nina as a child, while she was listening to her father's incredible stories based on his models…and as a slightly tired 40-year-old, who now walks among the dust and the ghosts of these old tales and models, in the basement of her aging mother who she’s taking care of.

With her character, our main intentions were to add some much needed feminine perspective to this very “masculine” world of boasting seafarers, as well as build on the theme of family generation and transmission that we touched upon in the first game.

And we loved the idea of having this out-of-time back and forth between Bob, the somewhat unreliable narrator and his now adult daughter who remembers and questions the stories she heard as a little girl.

BA: We wanted to offer a larger scope to the audience with the sequel but not by doing just more of the same… We had to create something that had the same spirit, something as strong and fun, but also make it innovative.

To do so, we felt we had to step out of our original mechanics and even outside the puzzle game genre to explore other mechanics and genres. We gradually evolved into making more of an adventure game with small action driven sequences. Even if the puzzles still play a big part in the game, the new bodily mechanics engage the user more physically and make these puzzles not only something for your mind but also for your body to play with!

AM: One of the very first things we played with was this ability to remove your hand and make it move around to reach remote places. So you play as a first-person explorer and a third-person platformer at the same time. Doubly so when your head itself is removed from your body and you can also move it around.

But one thing we discovered along the way was how much fun it was to just throw the hand. So we created lots of situations where you had to throw your hand around, almost like in a shooter, and then reel it back. Now you can really tell Bob spent a good chunk of his life as a fisherman!

And indeed, the Ship of Theseus parable being one of our inspirations, it was important to us that every part of Bob’s body get to change and be put to good use at some point.

BA: Since Another Fisherman’s Tale is a longer game, I would say that we learned even more through the making of Maskmaker, our previous game. Building a six-hour narrative-driven game with a limited budget (and during a pandemic) was really challenging! We learned a lot by working with a bigger canvas, both on how the production had to be managed and how the game had to be designed, with long stretches of gameplay.

One of the main things we learned from our past experiences is the importance of playtesting the game all along the way, from the very first steps of prototyping until the very end of production. As a developer working simultaneously on the multiple aspects of your game and testing it everyday, you can’t pretend to be in the shoes of players who will discover your game for the first time. So you need to have fresh eyes on it at each step of development to make the right calls. It’s particularly true when you’re trying to create something new in VR!

AM: The best puzzles are the ones providing the biggest “eurekas” epiphany feeling. In the first Fisherman’s Tale, I would say one of them comes toward the end of chapter one, when you realize that you can access a bigger version of an item (in this case a hermit crab shell) simply by putting the small version inside of the model, the recursion working both ways.

And without spoiling too much of Another Fisherman’s Tale: There’s a point when you are looking for an item in the first chapter of the game, and then you realize that some intriguing “out of reach” place is actually totally within reach—for a puppet able to throw away their head or hands at will!

BA: We just started prototyping some new and exciting concepts. We want to continue our exploration of other genres—there’s so much left to explore! Of course, we are also paying close attention to the new hardware evolutions, like eye tracking and mixed reality, which could open new and creative ways to blend stories and gameplay. So we are also experimenting with these to see if we can make something cool out of it.

BA: We hope players will enjoy this new journey of our little Fisherman, will have fun with some of the crazy possibilities offered by our mechanics, and will be moved by the story and the character of Nina, who we think some players can relate to.

In a nutshell, let’s hope some magic happens when they put the headset on!

And for more information about the game, you can visit our site and follow Vertigo Games on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Got a good head on your shoulders? Take it off and throw it—Another Fisherman’s Tale is out now on Meta Quest 2 + Pro for $24.99 USD.