Undesired Catch

I did not expect to spend an evening on a fishing boat inside a flooded biotech nightmare, and yet here we are. Undesired Catch is the kind of project that could only come from one person working alone with a specific, strange vision: you captain a fishing vessel through the flooded corridors of an abandoned scientific installation, using a ship-mounted crane to haul F-Pots out of the submerged darkness. F-Pots are transport cages holding Amalgams, creatures grown from a microorganism engineered to fuse or exaggerate animal species. The whole facility was built to be navigated by boat, because the reproduction liquid the organisms require has to flood the structure itself. That lore detail is not decorative. It is load-bearing, and the fact that a solo developer built an entire game premise around it earns genuine respect. The core loop is deliberate and tactile in a way that will split players cleanly. You sail, you position the ship, you work the crane, you haul up a cage, you stow your catch. The controls are tagged "Intentionally Awkward" on Steam, and the developer is honest about that choice: the clunkiness is part of the texture. Maneuvering a fishing vessel in tight, half-lit corridors is not supposed to feel like driving a sports car. Early demo feedback pointed to the crane obscuring your sightlines and the control mapping feeling unintuitive, and the developer iterated on both before the full release. Whether those fixes land well enough for you will depend on your patience threshold. Players who accept the physicality as atmosphere will find it atmospheric. Players who want responsive controls from minute one will bounce. What the game does earn outright is mood. The installation is described in lore as a post-accident ruin, sealed off, still partially functional but deeply wrong. Traversing it by boat means you are always at water level, always looking up at structures that were not designed for you to admire, just to move through. That framing produces a specific kind of dread that bigger horror games rarely bother with: the sense of being a small, mechanical thing inside a place that simply does not care about you. The psychological horror tag is not a marketing stretch. There is something genuinely unsettling about the quiet between catches. At this price point and runtime, the honest question is not whether Undesired Catch is ambitious. It is not, and it does not pretend to be. The question is whether its particular strangeness is worth your hour or two. With six Steam achievements, a linear structure, and a clear beginning-to-end arc, this is a game that knows its own shape. It is not padding its runtime. The community has already produced guides for players who get stuck on the crane mechanics, which says something both about the controls and about the people willing to push through them. An 84% positive rating across early reviews suggests the atmosphere is landing for most who give it room to breathe.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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