name: Kachuando Ririsu
number: 99577
days to beat: 9 + 9 + 5 + 7 + 7 = 37 days
genre: Arcade
theme: Romance & Fishing
platform: SFX
feature: Multi Theme!
feelies: Postcard
notes:
A reasonably successful Japanese indie game, "Catch & Release" gained a small but dedicated fanbase in the anglosphere among fans that were fortunately willing to circulate translations but were less-fortunately so enamored with the idea of Japanese culture that they refused to call it by its obviously English name.
The art of the game is pretty amateur, presumably done by the the two devs themselves, and includes a few examples that are mildly-edited versions of art from commercial games. Presumably this didn't result in legal problems because the game wasn't at any point really "sold". The Win screen did request you send some money to the so-called "company" responsible if you enjoyed the experience, after which they would send you a postcard from wherever they'd been recently, with some hand-drawn game art.
After some static exposition screens where a mermaid questions your strength and suitability as a mate and charges you to prove your worth, the gameplay looks a bit like a side-scrolling beat-em-up, but once you get a fishing rod and make it to the lake, the screen switches to underwater and the game changes focus to the hook, which is still attached to a line but controls like the ship from Asteroids. The goal is to get the highest point fish from as deep as possible while not getting your line intersected by shallower fish, which will break it if your trying to reel something in. There are some fish you don't want to catch but can reel up and release to eat any fish that are being too much of a nuisance, some fish are poisonous, and sometimes the mermaid requests only specific fish, and gives you a time limit. Each time your line breaks, your time limit on a request expires, or you reel in a poisonous fish or just the wrong fish irritates the mermaid, and if you do this three times it's Game Over. If your game ends with over 3,000 points, the mermaid declares her love for you, but if you don't first catch the Magic Goldfish then you can't breathe underwater and you drown while she kisses you.
The listed time to completion is how long it took me to get over 3,000 points before losing; I have not gotten the good ending.
Important addendum: the fish are color-coded and not well differentiated in shape, so this game may sadly be impossible if you're colorblind, though some modern fangames exist that address this problem.