Oh, another fishing game. Yay, I’m so excited about pressing the key it tells me to when it tells me to. I suppose I’ll just have to make this fun for myself somehow. Say, what happens if I just never let go of this key?
“You should be fishing, not hurting.”
Oh. I … did not expect to get called out by a fishing game today. But … thank you.
It’s the little details like this that make this game stand out for me. The sound design’s alright, the gameplay works, but the fish! The otherwordly fish! Not to mention the great sense of humour, witty but never mean-spirited. If you ever update this game to fix the bugs and add a little more I will pay you for it.
And the narration! I was so sad when I read it’s done by ElevenLabs, because I’d already written a sentence congratulating you for excellent voice acting. Fuck, the machines really will replace us soon. But at least they’ll gently tell us stories about fishing on a vaguely eldrich shore beforehand. Perhaps that’s not such a bad way to go.
Speaking of, I’m impressed with the story you managed to tell between the lines of this seemingly simple fishing game. Who are we playing as? Why is this person fishing ig in the dark? Are they there of their own free will or being compelled to do it? Why do they die/fall unconscious when their rod breaks? I genuinely want to know the answers to these questions.
Not that the game is perfect. In addition to the bug you’re already aware of, I’m pretty sure that the minigame where you have to press the key in the opposite direction of the fish’s sound isn’t quite working right; I keep killing the poor protagonist. The one where you have to reel the fish in only when it isn’t struggling gave me trouble at first, because I kept waiting for it to tire out before realising that no, it wouldn’t, I had to reel it in during the short pauses. It also wouldn’t hurt if there was a proper menu where you could move in both directions, using enter or space to select an option instead. But over all, this is the start of something beautiful, and I really hope you keep working on it.