So today I'm going to be reviewing the mobile game Out of Water. Funny story about this game, it's for, like, six year olds, like I got it for my son, Henry, and he played it a couple times. He would just, you know, do this, no big deal. It just... You have... It's basically just a skipping rocks game, only you're skipping fish, and different fish have different kinds of skills, and then you can use your little boosties if you just press the, just press and you get a boosty.

And you're trying to get as many skips as possible while also getting a lot of distance. It's basically a balancing act between the kinds of fish. Like this guy, he goes really far but he doesn't bounce as many times, you know. Then you can pick up those suns, they give you a little bit of extra boost.

So right. I get this game for my, at the time, five year old son and he opens it up, plays it a couple of times. He's like "It's alright, dad. It's not, it's not anything great, it's just not that, you know, it's not that, like, intellectually or emotionally engaging". And... But he did like this. He liked that you could sort of make different colors of jewels if you... There I got the green charm for instance. You could make different colors of jewels if you did, if you did certain things within the game, like if you completed certain goals and stuff. And then I didn't want to, like, pay for him to get those gems. You can pay, like, $5 and get all the gems that you want, but I, you know... That's just $5 wasted, really, was my thinking.

So I was like "That's fine, Henry. You know what I'll do? I'll play the game for you since you don't find it that intellectually or emotionally engaging, I'll just play it for you a little bit." As you can see, I'm pretty good. I'm actually much better than that, I wasn't trying hard. I'm embarrassingly good. What happened was that I got, I got kind of into playing Out of Water and here I am several months later, maybe the best Out of Water player alive in the world today. I consistently rank in the top, like, three or four... That was a really bad throw, I apologize to my friends and family. I'm nervous.

Oh no! I've got to give footage to Zulaiha at noon. I'm glad that was an unembarrassing calendar update. It wasn't, like, go get colonoscopy. So, right. I'm consistently ranked among the two or three best Out of Water players in the world each day. But based on the Out of Water user names, like the user names of the other players, I think that I am also the only adult player of this game which is, of course, a massive built-in advantage.

As you can see, every ten minutes the weather changes which makes things very exciting! And each different weather pattern requires a slightly different Out of Water strategy. I'm not, I haven't done well this time, by the way. I've just been focusing on other things. The other thing... Yeah, I mean 7.8. They say it's "groovy" but I think we all know that's embarrassing.

The other thing that you can do is you can put on costumes. I've unlocked all of the costumes because I'm way, way, way too good at this game. So I like Pirate Rocket for instance, he's... And then Afro Olympus is fantastic. And then, I don't like Headphone Finlay. Those are the only ones I actually need. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take Olympus here and I'm just gonna, he's gonna do a great job, don't worry. Even in this bouncy weather, he's still gonna be great.

So the problem is that I... I mean I, so, I... I don't like to blame everything that goes wrong in my life on my mental health problems, but I do have this disease called obsessive compulsive disorder that I think matches up really exceptionally poorly with games like Out of Water. I'm just so freaking good at it and it feels so good to be the best in the world, you know, that I do, I play a little bit obsessively. On the other hand, like, isn't there a pleasure to beating seven year olds? Not, like, obviously not, like, physically harming them, but, like, isn't there a pleasure to being the best at something in the world even if everyone else who's playing is a child?

When I watch my son play soccer I often think "Gosh. I would. I would, I would dominate this game". Like if I could just... If they would, like, sub me in, Henry's team would win every time. And it's not that I'm that great at soccer, it's just that, like, you know, they're six or they're that bad.

This is going to be a significantly better score. Yeah. As you can see things have improved. They say it's amazing. I think 9.5 for me it's just OK. I like to get straight tens, even from... That's Distance Dorothy. She bases her grades on how far you go. There's Hard-to-please Harwood. He's the one you really, he's the hard ten. He's the one that is slow to give the tens.

So yeah. This, this game which I downloaded for my son has now become a central part of how I live my life. I would like to do something else with my life like, you know, I often think about all of the things that I might be doing productively in lieu of pleasing Hard-to-please Harwood, you know, the other people in my life I might make happy who aren't red crabs created by Halfbrick Studios. But at the same time there is something just incredibly fulfilling about pleasing Hard-to-please Harwood. These games are so brilliantly designed around the human, like, the human urges to success. You know, they're just, they're just hard enough to keep you playing, and I have to say that in that respect Out of Water is a complete success, presumably for the five year olds it was intended for, but certainly for the middle aged men who ended up playing it.

So that is the story of Out of Water. You can see here King Micro just, he just, he loves to skip. He's got a dream. That was only 8.8. I'm better than that but I can't, I've never been a pressure performer and here you are watching me and I find myself completely unable to get the tens that I am totally capable of getting in regular life, I promise.

This guy, he's useless. He just bounces really high. He's just, I don't... Why did I even choose to throw this guy, Meredith? This was a terrible mistake. I think I'm going to stop playing this game. Like, not just now but hopefully forever. Thanks for watching, see you next week.