How to Fish

Every party game I plan a Saturday night around wants something before it gives anything back, and this one wants your dignity up front. You start drunk on a boat, you crash into a small island, and the only route home runs through learning to catch fish with a rod that is simulated rather than animated. That distinction is the whole game. There is no timing bar to hit, no cursor that quietly snaps onto a fish, nothing doing the hard part on your behalf. There is a line, a lure, your arm, and a physics engine that treats all three as objects with weight. My first twenty minutes were pure flailing, most of my casts landing in the boat I was standing in. Then something clicks, and every throw afterwards feels like you actually did it rather than like you pressed the correct button at the correct moment. Dazed Games has built this for one to four players, and the structure is refreshingly small. The island strands you, fishing is the way forward, and progress is the slow accumulation of competence rather than a menu full of unlockable stat bumps. Calling it a simulation is generous in the strictest sense. It sits somewhere between an action game and a sandbox toy, with the simulation label earning its place through the physics rather than through anything resembling tackle-box realism. Boating is part of the loop too, and moving a vessel around water with the same loose, weighty handling model produces about as much comedy as the casting does. Achievements are in, which gives the completionists in your group something to chase once the novelty of face-planting into the shallows wears off. On Steam it is sitting at Very Positive with 94 percent of over six thousand reviews on side, and having played it, that tracks. This is a game people finish a session of and immediately message the group chat about. Now the part I always check first, because it decides whether a game like this earns a slot in the rotation. Four players is the ceiling, and the co-op on offer is online. There is no local split-screen listed, which means the classic four-people-one-couch-one-TV setup is off the table. You need four machines and four copies. That is genuinely a shame, because the tone of this thing (chaotic, low-stakes, funnier the more people are laughing at once) is exactly what split-screen was invented for. What you do get is full controller support, so a living-room PC wired to a television with everyone else dialled in on voice chat works fine, and honestly voice chat is not optional here. Half the entertainment is hearing someone describe, in real time, how they have just hooked their friend instead of a fish. Playing this in silence with strangers would strip out most of what makes it work. Where it disappoints is predictable and worth knowing before you commit. Physics comedy has a half-life. The bit where the rod betrays you is hilarious for a few hours and then it is simply the control scheme, and at that point the game needs to hold you with something else. Solo, it holds you less. The stranded-on-an-island framing gives you a reason to keep fishing, but the loop is built for reaction and shared incompetence, and there is nobody to react with. There is also no assist or simplified control option in the listed feature set, so if the physics never stops fighting you, the game does not have a second way to meet you halfway. Add to that a PC-only release, which rules out the console crowd entirely, and rules out anyone hoping to hand a spare pad to a friend who does not own a gaming PC. So: not the game for a purist who wants line tension modelling and accurate species behaviour, and not the game for a host building a couch tournament night. It is very much the game for a group of three or four who already play together, already talk over each other, and want something with a low skill floor and a genuinely funny ceiling. If that is your crowd, the twenty minutes of initial flailing is the price of entry and it is a fair one. Bring a controller, bring voice chat, and accept that the first fish will take you longer than you would like to admit.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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