A Fisherman’s Tale review: surreal and innovative gameplay

This charming puzzle game is built around a very particular central gimmick—like the first-person shooter Superhot and its “bullet time” mechanic. The essence of the latter can be broadly explained by referencing the aforementioned effect, which, deployed in The Matrix, involves twisting bodies in slowed down time. But A Fisherman’s Tale’s core novelty is more difficult to articulate, involving manipulations of scale and interactions with multiple representations of the same environment. Beneath it is a mind-bending idea: that in this universe there’s no such thing as a root reality—only mirrored worlds in sync with each other.

Take a breath, because this might get confusing. We inhabit the body of a wooden puppet, who lives inside a lighthouse where, everyday, he works on his latest model, which is positioned before us in the centre of the main room. This model, as our husky Italian narrator explains, is “a perfect model of his own little lighthouse, exact in every detail.” The narrator notes that it “was nearly finished,” with “only two pieces needed to be added…the little model cabinet and the final section of the wall.” With both of those pieces clearly resting on the table, it’s obvious we need to pick them up and click them into place. 

When we do, the model becomes not just a microcosm of the space we’re in but a synchronized simulation of the space itself, any change to the smaller one affecting the larger (and vice versa). Making this mechanic even harder to explain is the existence of another representation of the space, above and around us. If we look up we see a giant version of ourselves, in a giant version of the setting, moving in perfect synchronicity with both ourselves and the tiny fisherman below us. We’re all versions of the fisherman, large and small: every version of the matryoshka doll, cosmically connected. As the narrator puts it: “He was inside the model, he was outside the model.” 

Things get even trippier when you move objects between large and small spaces. Inserting your hand into the model, for instance, creates a huge hand—your hand—that appears in the room, because all versions of the fisherman are synced. This synchronization enables the core problem-solving mechanic, many challenges relying on objects being rendered larger or smaller depending on which tier of reality they’re being inserted into or taken away from. 

During one early puzzle, for instance, our only friend in this world—a talking crab—requires a lifebuoy. The one in the same room as us is much too big. But the tiny version of it, in the model of the lighthouse, is perfect—so we remove this object from the miniature environment and place it in the larger one. Another early puzzle requires three pieces of piping. One is located by finding a tiny piece of piping that, once dropped into the model, becomes much larger (the proper size) in the primary environment. 

Confused? The difficulty of explaining A Fisherman’s Tale’s central mechanic brings to mind a quote from The Matrix’s Morpheus: “you have to see it for yourself.” It’s an original gimmick that distinguishes the experience from other puzzle-oriented productions.

The loose underlying story stringing the challenges together, which unfolds in a quaint children’s book style, involves making it to the top of the lighthouse in order to switch the light on and save a small fishing vessel navigating precarious waters. This provides some pleasant if twee narrative scaffolding over the game’s two hour-ish runtime. But when we think about the experience, it’s the mechanic rather than the story that comes to mind; I’ve never encountered anything else quite like it.