Simply walking around takes more focus in Octodad than it does in your typical game, because you must hold the left and right bumpers to raise your left or right "legs" and then maneuver those legs around with thumbsticks. It's almost impossible to walk around as Octodad without knocking over objects left and right, and that's a big part of the fun. Here you are, an octopus in a tuxedo on your wedding day, walking down the aisle, making a complete mess of things, and yet nobody suspects a thing. Like walking around, interacting with objects is also a lot more complicated for Octodad than it is for your typical video game hero. The fact that you use one thumbstick to move your "arm" horizontally and another to move it vertically fills tasks like grilling burgers and shopping for groceries with the potential for hilarious physical comedy.
The early stages aren't challenging in the least, and this works in the game's favor. You can just relax and laugh at yourself as your attempts to do ordinary things are rendered anything but ordinary by the fact that you are an octopus. But before long, Dadliest Catch loses its way. Despite Octodad's burbled objections, the family takes a trip to the local aquarium. Octodad is terrified of the aquarium because the marine biologists there, with their exhaustive knowledge of sea creatures and their remarkable powers of deductive reasoning, can see through his carefully constructed disguise and determine that he is, in fact, no ordinary father, but a cephalo-pop. You must sneak around these marine biologists, and once the game starts actually demanding some degree of physical prowess from you, the looseness and complexity that previously made the controls fun to grapple with suddenly make them frustrating.
