Fishy Business

My first honest reaction to Fishy Business was that it doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be - and that turns out to be exactly the point. Kali Yuga Games pitches this as an atmospheric adventure, and they mean it in the literary sense. You play an old fisherman, weathered by gambling debts and too much wine, who needs to sell his trawler to settle what he owes. The catch: the ship has sprouted a mystery room that doesn't appear on any blueprint. From that setup, the game quietly becomes something stranger than the fishing-adventure label suggests. The core loop is satisfying in a loose, unhurried way. You sail your trawler across an open-world sea, lower the trawl, and haul up whatever the water decides to give you - fish, treasure chests, or the occasional old boot. What you can sell, you sell; what you earn funds the next leg of the journey. On land, a deserted island hides secrets and at least one eccentric old man in a wizard's hat by a campfire. The exploration is top-down and 3D, the world is colorful and stylized, and the whole thing carries a calm, slightly surreal atmosphere that is closer to a walking sim with a fishing rod than to any kind of gear-progression sim. Where it genuinely stands out is the writing and tonal oddity. The game leans into what it calls "a touch of madness" - your character holds extended, meandering conversations with himself, and the conclusions those internal dialogues reach are genuinely unpredictable. Pair that with a scavenger hunt for vinyl records that play classical music aboard the ship, and you get a game that seems more interested in mood and character than in systems. The nonlinear narration and comedy tags on the Steam page are both accurate: this is funny in a dry, melancholy way, not a slapstick way. The honest caveats are real, though. There are no Steam user reviews and no Metacritic score to lean on, which means this is a game flying almost entirely under the radar. The community footprint is close to zero. For players who want clear feedback loops, upgrade trees, or a reason to come back after the credits - this probably isn't it. The fishing is a vehicle for atmosphere, not a depth-first mechanic. If you come expecting Dredge or a sim-adjacent trawler game, you will be confused. Come instead expecting something closer to a gentle, slightly absurdist short story you steer with a gamepad, and it clicks.

Alex · Scout Team

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