Tentacular Review (PS5) | Push Square

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Tentacular is a physics-based puzzler where you take control of a tentacled monster who's raised by the townsfolk of La Kalma, a small village in the middle of the ocean. You're on a journey of self-discovery, trying to find out how you came to be and where you belong.

Using your long sucker-laden limbs to manipulate objects, you must solve over 50 puzzling levels, that’ll take between six to eight hours to complete. These involve a wide variety of silly objectives, like throwing rockets through hoops, catapulting items at towers (Angry Birds style), or stacking shipping containers as high as possible. All these tasks are timed, and global leaderboards will entice you to improve upon your scores.

But while your tentacles are well tracked by the PSVR2 Sense Controllers, we found they often got stuck on the environment; pair this with wacky collision detection and it can be an infuriating experience at times. Luckily, there's a reset switch provided in every level to accommodate for this issue. Easing further irritation is a villager who's always located behind you, and he'll give you hints if you get stuck.

Control issues aside, the haptic feedback is great, simulating the feel of items smacking you square in the jaw as well as any nearby explosions. Eye tracking has also been used to make navigating the menus significantly easier. But despite some good use of the hardware, the rudimentary visual style, while pleasant, doesn't exactly push the technology to its limits.

Still, the scale of the missions really increases as you progress, and later levels — like the excellent heist one — offer a lengthy and complex challenge which we really enjoyed. In addition, we appreciated the sandbox area, as it provides an excellent