I Am The Captain Of My Fate, Gawd Help Me.

Not to spoil the ending but please read this post all the way through before forming any judgment on the demo or the game as a result of anything I might have written...

And finally, the demo I only chose to make up the numbers, Captain Pawsome. It's very much not the sort of game I usually play but I had a great time. 

The game's Steam page describes it as "a cozy 2D fishing game where you play as the cat", which makes it sound as though there's always a cat in games like this, only sometimes you don't get to play them. For all I know, that may be true. As I said, it's not my regular kind of game.

Not my first cat. Also I'm pretty sure they mean "Button" not "Bottom".

The first surprise was that there's a form of character creation. I was expecting to play a specific cat, the eponymous Captain Pawsome, no less, and indeed I did but you get to choose a variety of Pawsomian features such as the color of his fur, the way he styles his whisker and what his belly button looks like.

I made him into a blue-black cat with short, straight whiskers and a quirky, half-amused smirk. Then, as is all too common with most games where you get to fiddle with the appearance of your character, I barely looked at him again.

That wasn't because I couldn't see his face. Unlike the MMORPGs I'm used to playing, where character creation could more usefully concentrate on offering options for the back of your head than the front, given that's what you'll mostly be staring at for several thousand hours, Captain Pawsome is a 2D side-scroller. 

This place sure isn't going to get a Blue Flag.

I used to think I didn't like those much but I've had to re-assess my opinion of late. The format is actually very comfortable both to look at and control. It certainly gives you a good view of your character, albeit not in the round.

The Captain Pawsome demo seems to be yet another where all they've done is cut the Introduction and Act One away from the rest of the game and send it out into the world alone. I want to say it includes the tutorial as well but for once, honestly, I could have used more instruction. Such tutorial tips as you get don't go nearly far enough in explaining some of the basics.

You start on your boat, which is falling apart. It's patched and leaky and overgrown with weeds. There's a cabin and a bedroom and they're both inexplicably made of brick. Why? No idea. How? Never explained.

Does that look like the inside of a ship to you?

You'll learn later that Act One mostly consists of repairing and refurbishing your ship to meet maritime standards or at least to satisfy the Commander, a cat four or five times the size of any other cat in the port, who stands about on the dock 24/7 telling you what to do. By the time that happens, though, there's every chance you'll already have begun fixing the place up for yourself.

Before I even met the Commander I'd fished up a whole load of tin cans and wooden planks. I started out to go into town and see what was what and along the way I naturally pressed LMB for some reason or other and next thing I knew I was fishing. Nothing in the game told me how to do it. 

Nothing told me how to cast or reel in or anything. To be fair, instruction really isn't necessary because the controls are highly intutive and immediately satisfying. It's one of the better implementations of fishing I've tried and I've tried a few. Still, you'd think a game that's all about fishing might begin by explaining how to fish, wouldn't you?

I didn't actually take any shots of me fishing so here's one of me jumping instead.

I say "fish". At the start it's fishing only in the metaphorical sense of the word. On the end of your line there's no hook, just a magnet. The extremely polluted harbor is awash with tin cans, old floorboards with nails sticking out of them and clumps of general detritus, all of which are handily magnetic. 

I quickly worked out how to get them to tag on to the end of my line and how to reel them in, an activity that becomes more compusive the more you do it. At this early stage it's quite hard to lose something you've caught, although not impossible. Soon I had a bag full of rusted metal, sodden wood and sundry garbage.

I also had a roller skate and a tennis racket, both of which sparkled and glowed underwater in a way that made it obvious there was something special about them. There was. They were worth money!

Pretty sure that wouldn't float.

Once I'd found the Commander and had a chat with him I discovered I needed seaweed to catch actual fish. Seaweed grows on the seabed or on underwater rocks and has to be tugged free, which makes sense. What makes less sense is that you can do that with your magnet and that fish want to eat it when it's attached to your line. 

Do fish eat seaweed? Hang on... I'll google it... oh, yes, some do! Okay, I'll give them a pass on that one. 

With bait, you can catch fish. The Commander wants you to catch five. I did that. It was easy. Then he wants you to sell them. That's got to be easier still, right? I mean, in video games when you want to sell something you just offer it to any shopkeeper and they buy it. They all have unlimited funds, never sleep and buy whatever crap you want to get rid of. It's how it's always been.

This is what happens if you let cats become town planners.

I'd already been to the shops. There are several and the Commander sent me to one for something. I can't remember what. Bait, I think, although since you can catch fish with seaweed and it's free that doesn't make much sense either. Maybe I should have made some notes.

Whatever it was, I knew where the shops were - on the upper levels of the town, where you have to climb up ropes to get to them because obviously all sailors love climbing ropes and anyway everyone is either a cat (Also known to love climbing.) or a bird (Can fly.) so why would anyone live on the ground?

I went to all of them and none of them was buying. There wasn't even a sell option. I stumped around a bit, fuming at the iniquity of it all, then I tabbed out to look up "How to sell in Captain Pawsome".  I found nothing. Either no-one else had a problem with it or no-one's playing the demo.

Don't end a sentence a preposition with.

Eventually, entirely by chance, I happened to notice that the vendor who sells furniture for your boat has an aquarium for sale that he describes as "A place to put your fish for sale in!". He doesn't want any money for it, either, which is just as well because until I was able to sell my fish I wasn't going to have any.

What he did want were five tin cans and five old planks. He didn't say why. Maybe he makes his furniture out of them. Luckily, I had plenty of both from when I was teaching myself how to fish so I bought an aquarium. Then I spent a frustrating few minutes trying to figure out how to place it on my ship. Or anywhere.

I tried the deck, the cabin, the hold, the dock, the main street and anywhere else I could go. Everywhere said "Cant Build Here". Yes, without the apostrophe. As I was trying various spots in the hold, however, I noticed there was already an aquarium there. 

Well, where can I build then? Just tell me!

Funny. You'd have thought I'd have spotted that the first time I went inside. And there was also a sort of stand or display cabinet right next to it. And some strange cats were wandering about my boat, too. And going inside!

I was very vague about what was going on at this point. I though what might have happened was that reaching the stage in the tutorial where the Commander asked me to sell the fish might have made the aquarium and the stand spawn in the hold. Or maybe it happened when I bought the aquarium. Maybe you just needed to have it in inventory for it to appear in the boat. 

Or maybe the aquarium and stand had been there all along and I hadn't even noticed. I'm not playing through the whole demo again to revisit all the possibilities but that last one, at least, I can check. Hang on again while I make a new character and see if the sales counters are there from the start...

Wait a minute... what's going on?!

 

Oooookay....

Let's start again. Disregard pretty much everything I've said up to now. It's nonsense. I'm an idiot.

Here's the thing: when you very, very first log in after character creation, you don't appear, as I said, on your boat. There's a very important part I forgot: you appear on a bare stretch of rocks with a door (Screen left.) and some boxes blocking the path (Screen right.)

When I played the first time, I simply went through the door and appeared on my boat, after which everything above happened just as I described except for two things:

1. The Commander, whose full name is Commander Tuna-Breath, does explain how your boat got wrecked (A huge storm.) and tells you he's going to help you get it fixed up. That part I completely forgot.
2. The sales stands, aquarium and display case, are already in the hold of your boat. That part I just missed altogether.

You may well look surprised, Captain. Try paying more attention to your surroundings.

If, instead of going through the door, you jump over the boxes and carry on along the rocks, there's a whole fricken' TUTORIAL that explains absolutely everything I've just complained about not being explained, including how to fish, how to shop, how to sell and one very important detail I never discovered for myself, namely that if you press TAB it opens your inventory! I was wondering why I didn't have anywhere to put my stuff!

Geez. What a maroon.

At this point I think I'll just extend my deepest apologies to the developers, Chicken Launcher and the publisher, Awaken Realms, and sidle quietly away. 

I will just hang around long enough to say Captain Pawsome seems like it will be a really good game and that most of the problems I had with the demo were entirely my own fault. 

Don't think I'm meant to be all the way up here.

Not all of them - there was a bug where I got shot into the sky and had to restart from the last autosave - and I think the Tutorial could be made a little more obvious, with maybe an "Are you sure you want to skip the tutorial?" when you blithely try to walk through the door. Also, I still don't see why the interior of the ship is made of brick...

Anyway, I've wishlisted the game. It looks like it'll be a lot of fun. 

And that concludes October's Next Fest. The overall choice wasn't great but I thoroughly enjoyed most of the demos I picked and even when I didn't I learned something useful about the games so I guess that makes the operation a success. It also made for some really enjoyable and easy-to-write posts. I hope they were amusing/informative/useful (Delete as applicable.) to read, too.

Looking forward to the next Next Fest already.